He walked to the shul, down the steps, and entered. The room, without chairs or the table in front, seemed larger than he had remembered it. The ark, built into the east wall, had been stripped of its worn velvet curtain. Across the courtyard a door closed, but Danny did not hear footsteps.
The Genizah was locked. Did Dr. Fogel still have the key? Did he have Danny’s receipt? Danny saw that he might be able to use the tephillin and receipt someday as evidence, if necessary, to prove he had existed and had been a boy in the Home.
A shaft of moonlight shone through the door. Danny smiled, remembering the shaft of light that had led to Dr. Fogel’s father’s letter, and as he stared at the fluttering motes of dust he saw that the light was shining on a small scrap of paper, no larger than the palm of his own hand. It lay folded, in a sitting position, half on the floor, half against a side wall.
Danny picked it up and before he had read the words he recognized the handwriting—it was a piece from one of Charlie’s lists! Then Charlie had come for him! He read: “check Fed of JP again/ buy T notes/ Call Zond/Lil/Fgl/ Gtlmn/cityman/ buy sh crm bids/ 25 G for DG/ oil chang cr/ mk new list.”
Danny slipped the piece of paper into his pocket and climbed up and into the ark, sliding the doors closed behind him but leaving a slight opening so he could peer out. He felt calm. The inside of the ark was smaller than he had expected it to be, and in it he could neither stand nor sit. His nose itched.
A few seconds later he saw the policeman standing in the doorway, silhouetted by moonlight, and without seeing his face, Danny knew it was the same man he had seen in the cafeteria.
He saw the long silver cylinder of the policeman’s gun barrel, raised in the air. He thought he smelled parchment. A tiny spider crawled across his left shoe and out the crack between the doors. The policeman yawned, stretched, and sat down in the doorway, facing the courtyard. Below ground level, he would not have been seen by anyone in front of him.
“I can wait as long as you can,” the policeman said. “I can wait forever. Your best chance is to come forward now.”
Danny let his body dip backward slowly, so that the right side of his head rested against the back wall of the ark. He was amazed at how easy it was becoming, second by second, for him to stay still in such an awkward position—his neck crooked to one side, his knees slightly bent, one foot directly in front of the other, his back hunched over, the knuckles of his left hand pressed between his left cheek and the door.
The spider’s underside passed in front of him, going from one door to the other, then back again. He remembered when Charlie had told him about how in this room, as a boy, and before anyone had known of his reading problem, Dr. Fogel had picked him up in his arms every Saturday morning when the Torah was taken from the ark so that Charlie could kiss it with his lips. We kiss the Torah and we dance with it and we decorate it with beautiful velvet covers embroidered with gold and silver thread, Danny thought. We hang silver jewelry on it and put silver crowns and bells upon it and we kiss the fringes of our talises where they have touched its words.
Why?
Danny’s left eye bulged, looking through the crack. He saw silk lines glistening—the spider was actually spinning a web across the opening and Danny could hardly believe it. He stared, hypnotized, as the insect trailed a moonlit thread back and forth, and he tried to imagine the pattern of that part of the web which he could not see. He smiled and felt his cheek rub wood.
The policeman approached the ark and stood directly in front of it, watching the spider. Danny held his breath and could not, in the shadows, see the policeman’s eyes.
He tried to imagine endings to his life. He saw Charlie finding him, asleep in the ark, and carrying him across the courtyard in his arms, out the gate, and into his car. On the way to the hospital, Charlie driving recklessly and turning toward the rear to curse at Danny for having played the fool, the car swerved and crashed. Charlie was dead.
If the policeman went out and locked the door to the shul, what would Danny do then?
The policeman had his gun raised above his shoulder, the barrel in his right fist. Danny closed his eyes and, as the gun butt came crashing down against the ark, just below Danny’s nose, he held his breath.
“Got ’im.”
Danny’s mouth was open but he was not screaming because he knew that if he did the policeman might fire at him. He was pleased with his ability to control his body and his mind—to stay awake without moving and to continue to see epilogues in his head, even with his eyes open.
He saw Charlie and Dr. Fogel and Mr. Mittleman and Mrs. Mittleman and Sol and Ephraim and Hannah and Larry and Anita and Mr. Gitelman walking away from the cabin and getting into cars. Their faces were drawn. He followed them along highways and over bridges until they came to the hospital and walked up the stairs and stood around Danny’s bed, to see how well his bullet wound was healing. The policeman was there also, his hat in his hand, telling Danny that he had only been doing his job. He said he admired the Jews because they had finally learned to fight back.
The policeman and Sol talked about great Jewish boxers they’d seen—Benny Leonard and Barney Ross and Abe Attel and Gus Lesnevich and Jackie “Kid” Berg, and Danny watched them go out through the hospital door with Sol’s arm around the policeman’s shoulder.
“If you come forward now I won’t hurt you,” the policeman called. “After this I shoot first and ask questions second. I got a wife and five kids. You got three minutes.”
To keep himself awake Danny thought of the evil great men from the Bible had committed. Moses had murdered an Egyptian overseer and David had had Bathsheba’s husband killed and Saul had tried to have David killed and Cain had killed Abel and Abraham had been willing to kill Isaac and had sent Ishmael into the desert and Joseph’s brothers had sold him into slavery and Esau had been robbed of his birthright by Jacob and Noah had slept with his daughters.…
He heard a clicking sound and knew it was the gun. He believed the man, about waiting, and about shooting. If the man killed him, he wondered how anyone would ever know it had happened, or who he was. If the policeman examined his notebooks and discovered the truth—if he knew what to believe and what not to believe—he would realize the complications, and the publicity that would come for having shot a defenseless child who was also an orphan and a Jew.
Danny saw that he had no choice left, but he didn’t understand why this was so. Where had he gone wrong? What had he done to cause the policeman to follow him? And did what he was about to do mean that he should never have run away from the Home in the first place?
He couldn’t believe that. For what, he asked, would his life have become had he stayed there and never known Charlie?
He breathed in, as lightly as possible, through his nose, and decided to stop trying to imagine any life other than the one he had lived. He didn’t question the choices he had made, or even the mistakes, for they still didn’t seem to him, despite where he was now, to have been wrong choices.
He was not responsible for the policeman, he concluded, just as he was not responsible for being an orphan. The thought pleased him, but at the same time he saw that he was liable, at any instant, to move or to make noise or to fall asleep, and that if he did…
“All right,” he said, sliding open the doors to the ark. “I’ll come peacefully, Officer. I have no choice. Please don’t shoot. I’m only a boy. My name is…”
Nine
SUNDAY NIGHT
This is today’s true story.
HIS VISITOR COMES AT LAST!
by
Daniel Ginsberg
Charlie came to visit Danny today but Danny never said anything out loud to him, even when Charlie spoke about them being together again after they send Danny back to Brooklyn. Danny gets more things he wants from being quiet than from talking. He wrote a note to the Director when he first came here and told him about what they were going to do to the Home one day in changing it into a halfway house for Jewish mental
patients and other Jewish boys with Special Problems and the Director thinks that maybe it can be arranged and that’s what Danny wrote out in a note today to Charlie. That way he can be safe here until they renovate the Home and then he can go there again.
Danny wrote down for Charlie that he’s the only Jew in the place and that they won’t give him Kosher food. He told Charlie that a man has to stay with him in the mornings when he puts his Tephillin on because of the straps. They won’t force Danny to eat meat unless he starts losing weight or his blood tests show he’s ill. Charlie said he’d speak to somebody from the Federation about speaking to somebody from the state about having frozen food sent in for Danny the way they do for Jews on airplanes!
A question for whoever is reading this: If you were a Jew on a plane and Arab hijackers asked all Jews to stand up, what would you do?
Charlie and Danny would stay in their seats!
Under the Romans Rabbi Akiba said a Jew can forsake some rituals if his survival is at stake. But he can never forsake the study of Torah!
Also: The Rabbis say that God saved the Children of Israel from Egypt because EVEN UNDER SLAVERY THEY KEPT THEIR HEBREW NAMES.
What Danny was imagining when Charlie was with him: that they were 2 Rabbis reciting things they memorized to each other and that when it was time for Charlie to leave the aides listened to them debating each other very Talmudically and nobody could remember which one of them was supposed to be in and which one out!
Danny loves that idea! He thought of writing it down for his dear friend Ephraim as a story to be called THE TWO MAD RABBIS in which the reader would have to guess which one really was and which one wasn’t, but he decided Charlie would think it was too strange if Charlie was able to read any of it.
This is why Danny lets them read his notebooks now even though he hardly ever writes in them anymore, except to make lists or to put down the unimportant thoughts he has: because if he didn’t let them they would anyway! They read to him out loud from his notebooks and say things like “That’s very interesting” and then they wait and expect him to say something back, but he says Nothing.
They can never know what parts of his notebooks he wrote before the events occurred and what parts he wrote after and what parts he made up because he writes this down every time:
DANNY THE ORPHAN SAYS, “ALL ORPHANS ARE LIARS.”
A spider spins a web for 1 of 2 reasons: to trap other insects for food, or to lure his mate!
Danny never told Charlie about his plan to ask Charlie to take them both to Israel, but he believes that’s still 1 option that’s left, as long as Israel still exists.
What Danny thinks when he considers that sentence: But Israel won’t exist for the Jews forever! The Torah will. (Dr. Fogel was right all the time!)
Danny is quite content where he lives now, having all the time he wants. He’s in a place with boys nobody knows what to do with yet. Everything is temporary, even the buildings they’re in and the people who work in them. They can all be transferred at any moment if the state says so. They call the boys “a mixed bag.” People pass through the place where Danny lives going from 1 institution to another, or from 1 institution to the real world and vice versa.
Here are some places they go to and come from: foster homes, mental hospitals, reformatories, state orphanages, religious orphanages, courtrooms, halfway houses, religious organizations, welfare offices, real families, places for the retarded, places for the emotionally disturbed, places for the handicapped.
Danny’s the oldest boy here! He’s good at helping new boys when they 1st come in because they appreciate his silence. He doesn’t show any reaction to the things they do and say and after a while they just seem to be attracted toward him. Most of the day most of the boys sleep and watch TV.
Danny didn’t say anything to Charlie because he said to himself: As long as you’re out there and I’m in here, what do we really have in common? You can always come here if you want but I can’t go there. That’s the difference!
While Charlie was talking an 11 year old boy named Michael took off all his clothes and went to the bathroom on the floor. Danny showed Charlie his friend Jimmy by glancing at Jimmy with his eyes. Jimmy is 7 years old and goes back and forth in front of the window all day long like an upside down pendulum.
They don’t know where some of the boys here come from or what their names are. Some boys who come in at one end of the ward and go out the other are normal boys and they stay less than a week and Danny knows he’ll never see them again.
Danny thinks they’ll keep him as long as he wants them to because most of their cases don’t interest them the way he does, even if they read what he’s writing down right now! The 1st thing Danny ever said when the policeman brought him to the station was “I DON’T EXIST” and he discovered that he can repeat that out loud or in writing and it always gets people interested in him.
He showed his notebook to Charlie, offering him the chance to read what he writes now, but Charlie wasn’t interested. Charlie said he’s been studying with Dr. Fogel but when Danny didn’t ask him any questions Charlie didn’t tell him what he was learning. Charlie said that he and Dr. Fogel and Sol and Anita and Mr. Mittleman all talked about Danny after he ran away and here’s a list of their ideas:
1. SOL told Charlie to adopt Danny as a son until he was 21.
2. MR. MITTLEMAN offered to pay all costs to send Danny to Israel to live on a Kibbutz.
3. ANITA said Danny could live with her family and go to her school.
4. DR. FOGEL said Danny’s fate should be left in his own hands.
But when Danny showed no reaction to their ideas Charlie laughed and tried to brush his hair with his hand but Danny pulled away. “Oh Danny, Danny,” Charlie said. “What do you want from my life?”
And that was when Charlie informed him that if he got well after they send him back to Brooklyn, Charlie would be willing to let Danny live with him. He talked with people at the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and they were going to work things out. Charlie said he wanted Danny to have his own room and that he thought Mr. and Mrs. Mittleman would let Charlie pay to have one built on to the house.
He also told Danny that Anita sent a Thank You for the stopwatch. He said she was having a lot of fun with it. He said she was getting very big and very beautiful and was still in charge of the school and that he saw her almost every night.
Danny showed nothing in his face to his old friend. He didn’t trust him and he didn’t not trust him. That’s what life is teaching him!
Charlie said Anita wanted him to stay with her and her family for a while so they could see how things would work out and he asked Danny what he thought of that idea, but Danny just stared back into Charlie’s eyes. Charlie said he wasn’t going to do it, but not because of Danny. “There are lots of things you don’t understand,” Charlie said. “As smart as you are.”
Danny thought then of asking Charlie if he and his old friends were going to have a memorial touch football game in Brooklyn once a year for Murray but he didn’t.
Charlie talked about the other people they shared in common and this is what happened to all of them:
1. DR. FOGEL has gone to live with his older sister and her husband in an Orthodox section of Far Rockaway. He decided not to sell his land to Charlie.
2. SOL is living in a senior citizen city in California and selling real estate. Charlie left Danny one of Sol’s cards for a joke and told him to put it in his storybook, and this is what it was like:
PIONEER ESTATES
Pioneer City, California 94300
California’s Finest Resort-Retirement Community”
Peripheral Privacy Guaranteed”
Condominiums “Uncle” Sol Kantor
Homes Licensed Real Estate Salesman
Rentals (415) 586-3732
3. MR. MITTLEMAN had a stroke and is in the hospital. The left side of his face and body is paralyzed and his brain isn’t what it used to be. When h
e comes home he’ll never work again. Charlie and Charlie’s accountant have searched through his files but they can’t find books explaining his finances. Now they’re working from other documents but Charlie says it’s all a mess.
4. THE MAN FROM THE CITY is in jail and all that money is lost.
5. LILLIAN wants Charlie to send money for SANDY to go to college.
Charlie’s eyes were clear and he looked better than he did when Danny saw him in the country, and this is what Danny saw: that Charlie thrives most when other people need him!
Who needs him now? Anita and her children. Lillian and Sandy. Mr. and Mrs. Mittleman. Sol and Dr. Fogel. And DANNY GINSBERG!
Danny listened to his friend talk about different things and he thought to himself, Even though Charlie had the life he had from the time he was brought to the Home, he’s just a normal man. Charlie didn’t seem very large to Danny and it was hard for Danny to remember how they used to talk to each other so much.
Danny missed his memories.
Danny pictured himself on the hill overlooking the school with Charlie down below yelling at the boys while they practiced and he saw himself waving good-bye to Charlie. But Charlie didn’t look up and see him.
Danny wondered if Charlie was imagining what it would be like for them to meet in 20 or 30 or 40 years and what they would look like and if they would be old and stooped over. He felt that Charlie’s being with him and talking and Danny’s being with Charlie and not talking was like something he could have imagined before today ever took place!
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