An Orphan's Tale
Page 27
Nothing surprises Danny anymore.
Charlie said a man told him they’ll let Danny use the library next week but Danny didn’t tell Charlie that he doesn’t memorize sayings anymore. His head got too full of them and he needs to make room now because his next project is to memorize the entire Torah! He knows he can do it because what he’s memorized up until now would be almost twice as long written out as the whole Torah is. There are less than 9,000 basic Hebrew words in the Torah altogether.
Why Danny’s doing this: because he sees more than ever that Dr. Fogel is right not to believe in a mere nation such as Israel. THE ONLY THING THAT LIFE AND HISTORY TEACH US THAT IS CERTAIN IS OUR SUFFERING AND OUR TORAH! Those are the things that endure and that can never be taken away from us. Even if they burn our land and destroy our dwellings and take away our possessions and strip us naked, we can still carry His words in our hearts and our minds and they will sustain us!
*
Old age would be best, Charlie told himself as he drove home. He had always believed that. Despite the love and attention he’d received as a boy, for his successes, he remembered even then how he’d longed to be an older man. Old men, he believed, were free because they were farthest from their own childhoods. Charlie could hear all the arguments Murray would have given him, about the strength of emotions engendered in early years, but Charlie didn’t see why it had, necessarily, to be that way. When he reached forty he would be on the other side; he could, as it were, start again. When he learned to read and to study he felt he would also learn to lose those desires that now drove him, and that, as they had just proved again with Danny, troubled his life.
He sensed that he and Danny shared this, and the thought pleased him. He knew that, long before he reached Charlie’s present age, Danny would have lost the desire to remember his childhood. Charlie felt somewhat reassured to see that he was right: in all their conversations Danny had never—except for a brief mention of his mother—seemed to want to talk about the past. Nor had Charlie ever sensed that the boy made a special effort to deny all the years that had passed before he’d left the Home. They simply didn’t interest him.
Was this, then, why he had become so angry at the end of their visit—because he saw that Danny already believed what he was still trying to make himself believe? The boy’s silence had driven him crazy. Charlie had tried to stay calm, he’d tried to be kind, yet even while he’d been talking calmly he remembered noticing how hard his hand was squeezing Danny’s arm.
“Your trouble is you think too much,” he said just before he left. “You need to open up more, Danny. You resist things too much.” He was staring at his hand as if it belonged to somebody else. He knew that he was hurting Danny, but the boy wouldn’t admit it or cry out. “If you didn’t imagine me so much, you’d have done better, don’t you see? Come on. Tell me.”
Danny nodded his head up and down then, and Charlie saw that he was on the verge of replying. He squeezed harder. “I’m smarter than you give me credit for and I don’t just mean with money,” Charlie continued. “I’ll tell you this now because you’ll have plenty of time to think about it, right? Just because you think something doesn’t mean it can’t occur to somebody else!”
Danny nodded again, as if, Charlie thought, he were saying, All right. I’ll try to think about that is my answer to you, and Charlie let go of him and stood. “Damn!” he said. “Just forget the whole thing, okay? It’s crazy, my talking to you and seeing you but it’s like we never even knew each other. I’m glad I came but if you want me to come again you let me know, okay?”
Danny nodded his head to show that he would. They sat next to each other in silence for a while, their backs to the TV set. Nobody seemed to pay attention to them, but Charlie saw, for the first time during the visit, how happy Danny seemed. His anger had pleased the boy….
When Charlie arrived home the house was dark. Mrs. Mittleman had left him a note saying that she was at the hospital visiting Max and that Charlie’s supper was warming in a pot on the stove.
Charlie ate at the kitchen table, and, in his head, he saw himself standing with his back to the door of Danny’s place, telling Danny that he had begun putting on tephillin every morning and that Ephraim wanted to visit Danny also.
He saw Danny’s neck grow red as he shook his head from side to side to indicate that he didn’t want Ephraim to see him there. Danny gestured to Charlie to stay where he was. He went to one of the aides and the two of them left the room and when they returned Danny had his notebooks with him. He opened one, and, finding the section he wanted, he tore the pages from the notebook and handed them to Charlie. The section was called “The Epilogue.” “For Ephraim?” Charlie asked. Danny nodded, and, moving backward into the room, he smiled for the first time. “As a present?” Charlie asked and Danny, still smiling, nodded again. The smile did nothing to comfort Charlie.
*
A LETTER TO CHARLIE FROM DANNY
I just went downstairs to get a candy bar for energy. I have my own private room which used to be a Dr.’s office and I have a desk, but when they give me a pen or pencil a man has to stay in the room with me. The other boys are always exchanging clothes with each other but I still have the coat you bought me.
It was good to stop writing and get out of my own head for a while because it reminded me of what I really wanted to tell you, Charlie, with sincerity, the way I couldn’t tell you when you were here, and this is what it is:
I don’t feel any bitterness toward you, my dear and loyal friend. You did the best you could and you did love me in your way. But how many people in today’s world are capable of a true and full change of heart?
I can see you hanging upside down in the sewer as a boy with Murray holding you by the ankles, and I wonder: Do you exist or did I create you?
My Conclusion: Desire is Creation!
When you were leaving and the man unlocked the steel door I saw that you were tempted to take me around and give me a big hug and a kiss so I shuffled backward and then I smiled for the 1st time to show you that I plan to be getting out of here when the time is right. But this time I want to be exactly sure of where I’m going! If I didn’t want to keep to my rule of not talking I would have made a joke about how a member of an endangered species has to be extra careful and then my words would have reunited us in the right way, but I knew that the best thing is to do nothing. I’m still very young, whatever my exact age is. My setbacks are temporary. My whole life is ahead of me! For what do you have to show for your life, and you’ve lived more than twice as long as I have!
I do not cry unto the Lord! As the olive does not give of its precious oil except under pressure, say the Rabbis, so Israel does not bring forth its highest virtues except through adversity.
AS IT IS WITH ISRAEL SO SHALL IT BE WITH DANIEL GINSBERG!
Things I didn’t tell you: that I read about a system in France where you can buy an old person’s home from him while he’s still living in it. You give the old person the money to use and he can keep the money and still live in the house until he dies. Then it becomes yours. That’s a system Mr. Mittleman would have loved!
Also: that I observe the Sabbath here by praying and reading and not carrying or traveling or working or writing.
Also: that I saw you and Dr. Fogel and Mr. Mitleman on Dr. Fogel’s land.
Also: that I say Kaddish for Murray every day in silent devotion.
Also: all the other things that happened to me after I left you. I could write to you and tell you to ask somebody here for the pages for the days I was away but then you would only know about the things I wrote down and not about everything else that happened. But you would see at least 3 things in my notebooks that prove that not everything I say happened really did happen, including 1 thing in today’s story.
What are they?
You weren’t bothered by the other boys who stared at us and did things. One boy kept pulling your sleeve and saying, “My name’s Richard and I want a shower. My name’s Ric
hard and I want a shower.”
Things you forgot: You forgot to tell me about Anita’s other children. You forgot to tell me if you started practicing Shabbos. You forgot to tell me how you imagine Sol dying.
What I just realized: Maybe you were just making up all the things you said about praying and about studying with Dr. Fogel and about what all the people we both knew together think should happen to me and what’s happened to all of them since I left!
But if you could make all that up, then it was Danny Ginsberg’s influence on you that did it!
As soon as I think of him making things up so as to get me to wonder if he did or not I get the feeling inside myself that makes me feel best: that I can write forever even if they never let me out of here and I only have my memories!
This is what I wanted to say to him to make us both laugh: Life has mountains and life has valleys.
AND HERE IS MY MOST IMPORTANT DISCOVERY: THAT THE WAY I WAS GOING EVER SINCE I FIRST SAW HIM AND DECIDED TO RUN AWAY FROM THE HOME, THERE WAS NO SOLUTION TO MY LIFE!
But at the exact same time I still feel that Charlie and I could be so happy together, and I even saw that I could write a real story about what it would be like for us to be living together and eventually having our own families and sharing a large house, or 2 different houses on the same piece of land, and bringing up our children together and not having to search for our happiness with others! I could send him the story the way I sent “The Epilogue” to Ephraim, but I won’t do it because I know that he has to discover what I learned by himself!
In the story I could show what our life would be like without each other: I would stay here or run away again or be sent from 1 institution to another and all the while my talents would be drying up because the precious years when such talents are developed most highly were being neglected. (Remember Murray’s beliefs!) Charlie would continue in his life, struggling to support all the people who need him and wondering always if his life might have been different had he made a different choice.
By showing you that, the story could make you feel that it wasn’t just a fairy tale to consider us living together, as strange and without precedent as that might seem at 1st. If he sees that we really could be so happy together in a way most people never are and that his decision will make all problems disappear, then I know that he’ll do whatever has to be done and that we’ll both look back someday at this period of our life and chuckle over what happened in our early and difficult days! But I won’t write the story for him because if he believes that my story deceived him in any way by playing on his feelings, and forced him into believing, it would be just as bad as it was before. I would be living under the fear that it was all temporary again and that things we hadn’t foreseen or caused, like the policeman, would always be there threatening to destroy our life together.