An Orphan's Tale (31 page)

I have no obligation to bring joy into the lives of others at every moment of my life. I still believe in Simeon the Righteous's doctrine of Torah, ritual, and acts of loving-kindness, but the important thing for Danny Ginsberg right now is to consider his situation and to make New Plans!

That's what the Rabbis mean when they say “There is no Torah without bread.”

Despite all my setbacks, what surprises me is how good I still feel, as if I'm ready for any experience which may befall me!

There was a sign on Dr. Fogel's front lawn saying his house was sold. I looked in his windows and all the rooms were bare. Even the curtains and Venetian blinds were gone. The Mezuzah was gone from the front doorpost.

But this is what I thought: Even if he flew to Israel to spend the rest of his life on a Zionist kibbutz, my life would stay the same! If night becomes day and day becomes night, my fate still remains in my own hands.

What I still have to do, no matter what: find a place to stay until I can face Charlie and say to him: “THIS IS WHO I AM AND THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH MY LIFE AND THESE ARE THE THINGS YOU CAN HELP ME WITH IF YOU WANT TO.”

It's all right for Ephraim to live in the country because he was born there, but if Charlie asked me I would tell him he should come back to the city so he can be in touch with his early life.

Also: It would be all right with me if Sol lived with us too, since he's so old already.

*

Danny put a teaspoonful of strawberry jam into his tea, as he had seen one of the old men do. The sweetness caused him to close his eyes and sigh with pleasure. If Charlie should refuse him, he wanted to be able to allow that to make no difference either. If there were no records of him anywhere, then he wanted to be ready to demand that new ones be created. He wanted to be ready to go to whomever he had to go to—whatever civil liberties groups or legal aid groups or Jewish groups—in order to receive a true accounting of his origins: the names of his mother and father, and of their mothers and fathers; his real date of birth; and his rights, under law, concerning his future.

But until such a moment arrived he had to be careful. He could not, for example, as he had considered doing, spend his nights in bus terminals or on the subways, for if a policeman were to question him, and if someone else were to discover that he had no actual identity before he himself demanded that his identity be returned to him, then he would lose control. They would be able to do with him whatever they wanted to.

His secret wish—not so secret, really, since he had been prepared to discuss it with Dr. Fogel—was that he be sent to a Yeshiva where students lived in, if such a Yeshiva existed. In Yeshivas, he knew, students spent half the day studying Jewish subjects and learning Hebrew, and half the day studying what students in regular schools studied. So long as the Home had been alive, he supposed there had been technical reasons for keeping him there—but if there was no one place any longer into which a Jewish orphan had to be placed, and if he could demonstrate to them his potential for becoming a contributing member of the adult Jewish community when he would reach that age, he did not see how or why they could deny him. To do so, he told himself, would be to deny all of Jewish history and practice.

*

What I am: a good investment. If somebody were to support me now, he would be paid back many times over in the future.

I don't depreciate and my expenses are still deductible.

To remember: Don't be shy about my talents and brains and what I know.

What I need to do more of: Decide which talents to cultivate. There must be boys and girls my age somewhere who already practice musical instruments or study mathematics or science or Torah 5 or 6 or 7 hours every day. If you do anything that much every day you will eventually know things nobody else knows.

But I can't become like that until I have 1 place to be living in.

Is Dr. Fogel a happy man?

Like the men who are sitting around me right now he has observed ritual and studied Torah all his life and knows no other way of living. His devotion to the Home must be counted an act of loving-kindness no matter what his reasons were, even if rituals are to him like water to a fish!

But the Rabbis say this also: SUFFERING IS A GIFT FROM GOD.

What interests me as soon as I write down what the Rabbis say more than why they say it is this: Why, sitting here at this moment of my life, did the question about Dr. Fogel come into my head? If I didn't write it down, would the rest of my life be different than what it's going to be?

My conclusion: If I followed all my thoughts forever, to the ends and beginnings of their trails, I would never have time for living!

Coming into the city on the bus I saw what would have happened if I stayed on the land: I would have caught a chill. Each night I would have slept half-awake, worrying. My head would have become heavy with fluid and I would have been afraid to go to a doctor for fear he would have to know who I was or send me to a hospital and then they would have disposed of me through some agency that would have placed me with morons and delinquents and retards and retreads.

I looked at my reflection in the window of the bus coming here and I saw a scene with myself stumbling into a synagogue. People stared at me as if I was an old dwarf. I was shouting to them that it was my Bar Mitzvah. I saw clean-shaven men in Yamulkas and suits coming down the aisles to carry me away. I saw myself screaming that I was Jewish and that it was my Bar Mitzvah day and that I was in the House of God. I began chanting my Haftorah even as they carried me down the aisle above their heads. My nose was dripping and my eyelids were stuck together with phlegm. My ears were stopped up. Yet my voice, when I heard myself singing, was pure and sweet like a child's!

Outside in the lobby of the synagogue they laid me on the marble floor, which was made of large black and white squares. They wrapped me in an army blanket and telephoned the police but I rolled away from them out the door, down the steps and into the street, and I got up and ran deliriously until I found another Synagogue! I went inside and saw that the Ark was open and they were taking out the Torah. The Cantor and Rabbi wore long black robes and the Torah glistened with its silver breastplate and silver crowns. I smelled cloves. I hid behind the back row where nobody could see me and when it was time for the Bar Mitzvah boy to be called to the Torah I marched down the aisle, my eyes on the Eternal Light, and summoned myself to the Bimah. I could smell my own foul odors as if my flesh was already rotting! I had the army blanket wrapped around me to cover my body where it showed through the slashes in my clothing.

I stopped, realizing that I could not in summoning myself for the Aliyah give the name of my father. A thick crowd of men in black suits was blocking my way to the Bimah.

The real Bar Mitzvah boy was holding his mother's hand and giggling and pointing at me. I demanded that the men let me through but they pushed me backward and walked over me. Then they lifted me above their heads again and I floated out of the sanctuary. The Rabbi stood above me, and when my blanket was torn away, he looked at me and then said, with disgust, just like Dr. Fogel: “Do you call yourself a Jew?”

Here's a beautiful new one I memorized from PIRKAY AVOS on the bus: “If love depends on some selfish end, when the end fails then love fails. But if it does not depend on a selfish end, it will never fail.”

This is why: If you love a woman because she's beautiful and she becomes sick and loses her beauty, then the love is gone too. But where love is for the sake of God, as when a disciple loves his master in order to learn, then the love never vanishes because the cause endures forever!

*

Danny went to the counter, bought a cheese Danish, and asked that his glass of tea be refilled. The old man who served him looked past Danny and said, as if to no one, “It's snowing.”

Danny sat at his table and watched the large white flakes fall. He saw himself, on the ground, with flakes falling on his own cheeks and covering him. He saw Charlie and Dr. Fogel finding him there, on the forest floor, hard and cold, and he saw the tears in Charlie's eyes—and then, what thrilled him more, the anger.

He saw Charlie raise his fists to the sky and curse God. Dr. Fogel walked away, into the woods. I'll be with you soon, Charlie, Danny said to himself as he sipped his tea. We'll be together again. He saw Charlie walking into a strange synagogue. Charlie sat, without praying, for hours—through an entire service—until the time came to say the Kaddish. Then he rose.
Yisgadal v'yiskadash
… Would Dr. Fogel have stopped him if he were sitting in the same
shul?
If Danny had no blood relative living after him, who would the Rabbis say would be allowed to say
Kaddish
for him? What was the Law?

He saw Charlie sitting on a tree stump, his head in his hands, snow resting like a fine net on his black curls, and then he saw his own body rise from its mound of snow, shake the flakes away, and he heard himself shout: “Surprise!”

*

Each error I make leads me closer to the truth, for I know better the things I cannot do! I could not stay with Charlie without any definite arrangement, but I did not have to leave him the way I did. That was an error. But once I left him and forced him to make a decision I could not simply return and say I made a mistake because that would have made him think I was too weak a person for him to want to live with permanently!

The question now is how can we continue to live together if he'll have me if my official identity has been destroyed? I have to know how old I really am! I have to be Bar Mitzvahed because of what I believe about being Jewish!

I can't live in fear from day to day that at any moment I can be taken away from him.

What I'm doing about it: I'm narrowing my “options.” I can't stay with Charlie for the above reasons and I can't stay with Anita because he would know and because they might think I was trying to come between them if they have plans, and I can't stay on Dr. Fogel's land because of the people who come there and because I might become ill, and I can't stay with Dr. Fogel because I don't know where he is. I have $13 left and some change but I can't go to a YMHA because they might demand identification even if they believe the age I give them.

A question: How normal do I really want to be?

*

Danny looked up and saw, through the window, a tall boy in a green silk shirt and black silk pants striding along, no more than five feet away. The boy wore a wide-brimmed white hat, had a silver toothpick in his mouth, and was surrounded by a circle of Puerto Rican teenagers, who kept pace with him. Around the boy's neck, on a heavy chain, was an enormous silver Star of David, with what looked like a diamond in its center. Danny exhaled in awe and looked into the boy's face: it was Larry Silverberg!

He saw Larry look toward the cafeteria—right at him—but he didn't know if Larry could see more than his own reflection. Danny found himself rising from his chair and waving at Larry to come in, but Larry was already gone.

Should he follow him? Danny sat and tried to know what the right thing to do was. He didn't trust his feelings. His head filled with questions. Why was Larry wearing a Jewish star? Had he changed? How had he been released from jail so soon? Where was he living? Danny wondered, for an instant, if Larry had in some way been sent to lead him to safety, but as soon as he thought such a thought, he laughed to himself: why would God bother to joke with him in such a way?

He saw himself inviting Larry to sit at the table with him in the cafeteria, and he heard them talking to each other. Larry would slap Danny's back and say something like “Fancy meeting you here!” and Danny would tell him how good he looked.

“So tell me, Danny,” he heard Larry say, fingering his Jewish star and sighing, “how've you been?”

“Not bad,” Danny would reply. “And yourself?”

“Can't complain,” Larry would say.

Danny saw Larry inviting him home, so that they could live together. He heard them reminiscing about the Home, and he heard Larry praising him for having run away.

*

Just a moment ago, while I was wondering where I would spend the night, LARRY SILVERBERG walked by right outside the window, almost close enough for me to reach out and touch him and I wondered for an instant if he had been sent as my Deliverance!

I saw so many things at the same time!

I saw us talking about old times at the Home like Charlie and Murray and Irving, and I heard Larry asking me if I remembered the time they let a boy stay with us for a few days before they realized he was in the wrong place and should have been sent to a different place, with other Mongolian children. The boy was Jewish. Samstag was his name but I remembered his nose was so pushed in like an Irishman's that we called him O'Hara.

This is what I heard Larry say to me: I wouldn't want to be like that. If I had a kid born like that I'd flush him down the toilet first thing and tell them they couldn't do nothing to me without the evidence. You see people walking in the streets sometimes with idiot kids who are 50 years old and what good does it do for anybody?

What surprised me: He wore an enormous Jewish star on his chest with a sparkling diamond in its center. He said that O'Hara had bad blood and tried to kill Heshy with a pair of pliers by pulling his teeth from his head but that he caught him and beat him up. I told him I never heard the whole story.

I imagined us living together and me helping him in his work. This is what I made up that he does: He sells welfare documents and social security cards. He caters to a Puerto Rican trade and he told me he could get passports and draft cards and driver's licenses and he said he would get me a new birth certificate in the name of Charles Fogelstein but I said I wanted my real birth certificate in the name of Daniel Ginsberg, so I can know when my Bar Mitzvah is.