An Orphan's Tale (30 page)

“I used to think,” Daniel said, “that if I had not left him, he would not have become ill. That was the way my mind worked in those days, though I see how foolish such thoughts were.”

Ephraim, who vividly remembered visiting the man in question in the hospital before his death, did not tell his friend that Charlie had asked for Daniel frequently, up until the end!

Dr. Fogel, who had been a teacher to both Murray and Charlie, and to Daniel also, had died, and according to his wishes, his body had been transported to Israel for burial.

Mr. Mittleman had died, but Mrs. Mittleman was still alive, and quite a wealthy woman. She was living in a retirement village in Florida. Anita visited her several times a year and the 2 women shared much, strange to say.

Ephraim did not know what had happened to Charlie's wife or beautiful daughter. They had moved away from Brooklyn and no one had heard from them again. Some of Charlie and Murray's old friends, for they had grown up in the same orphanage in which Daniel himself had been raised, still kept in touch with Ephraim, though a few of them had died.

Irving and Jerry and Herman had died. The others had not.

The 2 friends laughed together, remembering experiences they had shared, but they did not make any promises about seeing one another again, for to do so would have ruined the magic of the afternoon.

“Will you stay and eat with us?” Ephraim asked.

“I fear not,” Daniel said, and Ephraim understood.

The friends were at the door when a car drove up and 3 children bounded out of it. “Your boys!” Daniel said.

“They're just returning from Hebrew School,” Ephraim said. “We have a synagogue in our town now, and quite a nice community of Jews.”

“Would Dr. Fogel approve of them?” Daniel asked, and the 2 friends laughed at the joke.

Then Ephraim, after mentioning to Daniel that he had for many years feared that his friend was long since dead, introduced his boys to Daniel and they each gave him their names. The oldest, 12 years old, was named Moshe, and the middle son, 9 years old, was named Chaim, and the youngest boy, who was 4 years old, was named Daniel!

THE END

This is what I believe: True friends lie to one another, the way Ephraim did to Daniel when they were boys.

A puzzle Ephraim showed me in a book:

My diary is the box and my story is the sentence.

What I know nothing about: what it's really like to study Torah. What would a truly wise man do to me if he saw my thoughts written down?

In Murray's study once I looked into one of his volumes of the Talmud and I couldn't understand anything except a few words. The Talmud is written mostly in Aramaic. There is a Babylonian Talmud and a Jerusalem Talmud but I couldn't even tell which one I was looking at.

When I think of all the things I would have to learn, first just to be able to read and understand the letters and words themselves, and then to know how to follow the arguments between the Rabbis and understand them and interpret them, I get sick inside!

I don't even know what any boy my age who goes to a regular Yeshiva knows. My memorizing is no substitute.

Can a dedicated man learn as much between the ages of 55 and 65 as he does between the ages of 5 and 15? Why should there be such a difference?

Oh how far I am from God, whatever my real age may be!!

TUESDAY

It rained all day today and I didn't go outside. I stood at the window but he never came. Have I miscalculated?

Asking myself that question makes me especially calm and I don't know why. I made up no stories today. I stood at the window and prayed and waited. I tried to ask myself what we really have in common, other than our origins, and why, really, I ever expected him to take me in.

I was outside just before because the rain stopped. There was a full moon in the sky and the clouds floating in front of it like vapors made it look like a sliver of dry ice with steam coming off. I felt very close to it, as if I could touch it and burn my fingers!

There are special prayers for the new moon and the new month in Hebrew but I don't know what they are. The Jewish calendar goes according to the changes of the moon, not the sun, and I don't know why that is either, or whether it was always that way.

In the time of Rabbi Akiba some Jewish men had a dangerous operation performed on themselves to conceal their circumcisions against the Romans.

How much do I know about all the exact persecutions Jews suffered throughout History?

I found some empty cartridge shells in back of one of the other cabins, but I haven't heard gunshots or seen tracks of any hunters.

Is Charlie with Anita now, and are either of them thinking of me at this moment?

WEDNESDAY MORNING

Sometimes I'm an idiot!

I woke in the middle of the night and heard them, across the way, in another cabin. At first I was scared, but then I listened for a while and I could tell they were just teenagers making out. They were laughing and struggling with each other and throwing beer cans against the walls.

I walked across the clearing and listened at the wall to their cabin. I heard a girl giggle and say, “Don't you 2 do anything we wouldn't do!”

I heard a guy's voice and he sounded drunk. I couldn't make out his words, except that he kept saying, “C'mon, huh? C'mon, huh? C'mon, huh?”

I heard another girl giggle and tell somebody to stop, but she didn't mean it. I wondered what she looked like. Her voice was very refined, as if she took speech lessons. She sounded much older than the others and I wondered what she was doing there. I wondered what her face would look like in the morning when she faces her mother across the breakfast table.

This is what one of the guys shouted that made the 3 others laugh: “Because it's my birthday!”

Then I acted like an idiot, I don't know why. I just kicked the door open and yelled in at them, “THEN HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GANG!” and then I ran!

The girls screamed but I didn't wait to see what any of them looked like. I ran into the woods behind the clearing through the wet leaves and the slosh and I didn't stop until I thought I was far enough away. The girls were still screeching and I heard the guys cursing and yelling at them to shut up.

They probably thought I was just somebody from their school who followed them but I can't take any chances.

It doesn't matter why I did, even if it was just for fun, because it told me what I must have wanted to tell myself anyway: that I shouldn't stay here anymore. Charlie might come back again, and then again he might not. There's no reason to wait any longer. The best thing is to admit that I miscalculated and to go forth.

What the words “go forth” remind me of: the Rabbi's speech at Murray's funeral.

In the woods, thinking of them hopping around with their pants caught around their ankles, I had a good laugh. I thought of the guys at the Home and how I would have been a hero to them if I could have told them a story like that about myself! I could have added things about seeing the girls naked and it wouldn't have mattered if anyone believed me or not.

I sat on the ground with my back against a tree and didn't think about anything except how I must have scared them to death and about what a child I was not to have been able to control myself when he said it was his birthday.

What I forgot to do: wish him a “mazel tov.”

Even if I hadn't barged in on them, how can I sleep in the cabin tonight wondering if they'll be coming back? If I sleep outside I'll surely catch a terrible chill. Just from sitting on the ground for less than an hour with my jacket under me I'm sniffling this morning.

When everything was silent for a long time I walked back to the clearing. The sky was filled with millions of stars and I thought of God's promise to Abraham.

There were 9 empty beer cans in their cabin and some leftover potato chips and a damp army blanket they left behind. I took it to my cabin and I lay on the floor with it under me and that way I couldn't feel the dampness under my coat. I was afraid to go to sleep for fear they'd return but I rested well until sunup.

Then I said my prayers and had a farewell breakfast of potato chips, warm beer, bread, and lettuce. I'll get something warm to drink in town at the bus station before I leave.

Will I ever see this land again? If I hadn't come here to wait for him, in how many different directions might my life have gone? But since I did come here, even though it was a temporary mistake, it was a necessary step for me so that I might realize how foolish my planning was,

for I was really waiting on him to do something instead of relying on myself to create my own fate.

That was what my foolish act last night showed me, so that I revise my earlier statement about you being an idiot, Daniel Ginsberg. For if you had not acted the fool you might have erred in waiting here even longer!

Charlie will be surprised when he sees me to find such a new look in my eye! He'll see that even though I have to make plans and decisions concerning my future, I'm not as much in need of him as even I thought I was a few days ago.

My name is Daniel Ginsberg and I come from the Home and I can save myself, thank you.

Hear O Israel the Lord Our God the Lord is One!

Danny sat at a table in a corner of the small cafeteria, sipping from his glass of tea. As disappointed as he had been at not finding Dr. Fogel at home, he was surprised at how good it felt nonetheless simply to be in Brooklyn again. He had been foolish in those thoughts also: imagining himself living in the country all the time with Charlie.

He had even, during his walks around Dr. Fogel's property, sometimes imagined an entire colony of orphans there, living new lives. In Danny's dreams Charlie had, of course, been the director of the colony, one that contained hundreds of Jewish boys, including refugees from all over the world. There had been classes and workshops and teams, good meals and singing and parties and dances. On Saturday nights, busloads of beautiful young girls had been brought in (blindfolded, so they could not return on their own), and Danny had fallen in love with one of them….

Danny felt comfortable in the cafeteria, among old Jewish men. Next to the counter two bearded men were playing chess, and two others, looking like their twins, sat behind them, watching the moves. This, Danny thought, remembering Charlie's phrase, was probably their home away from home.

Through the window Danny watched a Puerto Rican fam ily moving their possessions. The father had ropes around his chest and, as he pulled a dolly loaded high with boxes and clothing and furniture, he strained forward like a workhorse, steam billowing from his nose. At the very top, a large green stuffed easy chair was turned upside down. A boy wearing sneakers pushed the load from behind, one hand stretched high, on the leg of the green chair, to keep it from toppling. The mother walked behind the boy, pushing an enormous black baby carriage that overflowed with pots and clothing and clothes hangers and plastic dish drainers and toys. She carried an infant in a pack on her back. A small girl in a red flowered coat walked at her side, sucking her thumb and pulling a wagon filled with shoes.

Danny had intended to pay Dr. Fogel for his room and board. In his situation, the best thing would be to keep all arrangements aboveboard; he did not want anything for nothing. What he did want—and what he had intended to explain to Dr. Fogel—was to live in an Orthodox Jewish home during the weeks preceding his Bar Mitzvah. Dr. Fogel was the only person he knew who had a home that was both kosher and located near a synagogue.

If Dr. Fogel had been unwilling to take him in he would have asked to be sent somewhere else—another Jewish home, a Yeshiva that had sleep-in facilities, a hotel or rooming house that catered to Orthodox Jewish men. Whatever else Dr. Fogel might have been capable of, Danny had reasoned, he could not have knowingly kept another Jew from the performance of a
mitzvah
.

Danny warmed his hands on the outside of the glass of tea and bent over it to sniff in the steam. He'd had the passage ready for him, should he have needed it. Had not Simeon the Righteous said that the continuance of the Jewish people depended on three things—the study and practice of Torah, religious ritual, and acts of loving-kindness?

Danny took out his notebook. None of the men in the cafeteria seemed to question his presence. He wondered what they would say were he to go to each of them and tell them his life story and then ask for theirs. He would stand in the middle of the room and ask who would be the first to teach him Yiddish, and who would be the first to tell him about his childhood, and who could remember a story his father's father had told him when he had been a child….

*

I'm in Brooklyn again and I'm sitting in a room called Skulsky's Dairy Cafeteria with 8 other Jewish men, and I know I made the right decision in leaving. They're old men and I could probably make them happy by telling them about myself and making them tell me about themselves, but the best thing is to do nothing.