The Instructions (79 page)

The cat bolted at me, tripped on lint, laid there.

I set the previous night’s scripture on the music stand.

“You daddy,” said Flowers, pointing at the television.

“…v. the City of Wilmette is nearing its conclusion,” said an offscreen anchor. Onscreen was footage from outside the Drucker trial.

The anchor said, “Here we see protesters gathered on the courthouse steps for the tenth consecutive day.” A mob of Israelites stabbed at the clouds with picket signs. Some of the signs said NEVER

AGAIN and others showed a photo of Patrick Drucker sieg-heil-ing that didn’t look doctored. The majority of the signs were protests against my father, though. One kind featured his photo with 731

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a large-lettered legend that read ROY COHN FOR DISTRICT

ATTORNEY OF COOK COUNTY on one side, and HAMAS,

AL QUAEDA, HEZBOLLAH, MACCABEE on the other. Others inverted the arrangement—a photo of Roy Cohn and the legend JUDAH MACCABEE FOR DISTRICT ATTORNEY OF COOK

COUNTY; ear-to-ear headshots of bin Laden, Nasrallah, the dead wheelchair guy from Hamas and a black circle with PASTE JUDAH

MACCABEE HERE in white letters in its center. Another sign had no photo at all and just said PASTE JUDAH MACCABEE. I’d seen similar signs a few months earlier during Shmidt v. Skokie, but there were more of them for this trial, fifty easy.

The other side’s signs were more varied; unlike the protesting Israelites, who had all come to the courthouse on the same char-tered bus, the other side, though smaller, comprised a number of separate factions. The Neo-Nazis’ signs read HEIL DRUCKER!

over an American flag with fifty tiny swastikas where the stars should have been. The head Nazi waved an actual flag of that description in the air above his helmet. Another group, much larger, who stood nearly as far from the circle of Nazis as they did from the Israelites, carried signs that read ZIONISM = NAZISM

and ADVANCED INSTITUTE FOR THE PUPPETEERING

OF AMERICAN CORRUPTION. The graphic on those was an outdated caricature of Ariel Sharon (no longer the prime minister of Israel, he’d been in a coma for ten months by then), with an extra-hooked nose and blood-dripping fangs, his claw-tipped fingers in the loops of strings connected to the limbs of an Uncle 732

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Sam marionette who wept while stepping on the neck of a baby in a turban. A third group’s signs were maps of the Middle East, all beige, except for Israel, which was black—one legend read THE UNHOLY LAND and another LAND OF BILK AND

MONEY. A lone, clueless man who wore a keffiyeh over his skimask carried a sign with a target on it, and WTO was written in the bullseye. There were at least five other small groups, all of them forming different circles and carrying different signs, but the camera didn’t linger long enough for me to make them out.

The anchor said, “Inside the courthouse, however, things weren’t so calm,” and three drawings appeared onscreen for a few seconds each—the first of a group of white-haired audience members on their feet, their mouths open wide, their fists in the air, while my father, in the corner of the drawing, leans on the jurybox, hanging his head (“Here we see an artist’s rendition of Judah Maccabee being shouted down during closing arguments by a group of several elderly Jewish protesters,” narrated the anchor); the second drawing was of the frowning judge banging his gavel (“…our artist’s rendition of the Honorable Michael Hall calling for order”); and the third was of the shouters being led out of the courtroom in zip-tie handcuffs (“…officers arresting the protesters on contempt-of-court charges…”).

The screen switched. It showed a pair of vans, cops holding the doors open.

Flowers said, “Whoah. This not exactly common.”

The anchor was saying, “…live broadcast of the jurors board-733

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ing—are we allowed to show this? Well… What you’re seeing is a rare, live broadcast of the jurors boarding the vehicles that will return them to their motel, where they’ll deliberate the fate of Patrick Drucker and his pamphlets.” Approaching the van, the jurors hunched their shoulders and turned their faces from the camera like red-handed felons. “Good luck to them,” said the anchor. “We’ll return with the weather.”

Flowers hit the POWER button just as a used car commercial started jingling.

“You dad gonna win,” he said, “and quickfast.”

I said, Those jurors didn’t look happy.

“You wouldn’t look happy neither, you had to hand down a verdict favor Drucker.”

So why do
you
look happy? I said. It came out of me like an accusation. I wasn’t pissed at Flowers, but the way I asked the question, it seemed like I was. Who I was pissed at was Adonai for making men who hated Israelites, and at the Israelites for hating my father, and at my father for defending men who hated Israelites. Why was the world always uniting against the Israelites?

Why were the Israelites always uniting against Israelites? Why was each question the only answer I could ever come up with for the other?

So why do
you
look happy? I said to Flowers. I said, I don’t think Drucker loves black people much, either.

“I’m happy cause you dad an old friend about to win something he been fighting for. And I’m
sure
Drucker don’t love black 734

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people, but that don’t mean he should be outlawed from
saying
so in Wilmette… click click click… Now, how you said that—that’s bothering me. Drucker don’t love black people
either
—what’s that? What’s that
either
? You ain’t black youself the sudden?”

It was the start of a conversation that I didn’t want to have, but it was important to Flowers that we have it every couple weeks.

Only bancers care if I’m black, I said.

“I guess you calling me a bancer then, ever the hell that means.”

I said, You don’t really care about the color of my skin, Flowers.

I said, You just think you’re supposed to. I said, I’m your friend Judah’s son who writes and that’s what matters to you. That’s why you’re my friend.

“That don’t change that you black.”

I said, I’m an Israelite.

“You a black Israelite.”

And I’m an Israelite with detached earlobes and I’m an Israelite born in Chicago and I’m an Israelite who usually wears a hoodie and an Israelite who ate chicken last night. An Israelite is an Israelite, I said.

“Black is black,” said Flowers.

I said, Only because you say so.

“A lot of people would say so,” Flowers said. “And from what you tell me, ain’t no shortage of Israelites who’d reduce you to
only
black.”

You and them—you’re all just people, though, I said.

That cracked him up. “Oh, I guess I misunderstood—you’re 735

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like a hippie, now,” he said. “That girl from yesterday must be doing some job on you, man. Good for her. Good for you. It’s a healthier way for you to be.”

Good teachers are so busy listening for a sign that you’ve learned what they’ve tried to teach that they almost can’t help but eventually hear it, even when it isn’t there, even when it’s the opposite of what you’re really saying. Flowers heard
we
where I’d said
you
. He heard “We’re all just people,” as in, “If we could only get over our superficial differences, we’d all love each other,” when that wasn’t what I meant at all. What I meant was that I was the Israelite Gurion ben-Judah, so I didn’t have to answer to people. What I meant was Adonai doesn’t care what color my skin is, but He does care that I have the soul of an Israelite—He treats me differently because of it.

“So how
is
that girl?” said Flowers. “June, right?”

I kissed her, I said.

Saying that, my mouth remembered the push of June’s tongue, and I shivered. I knew the memory would wear out with use, and I saw I had to be careful not only about how many times I used it, but when I used it, too. If I hadn’t remembered June’s tongue, I would have stayed pissed about Adonai and my father and the Israelites, and I should have stayed pissed—it was important to stay pissed about those kinds of things, to hold onto the pissedness until it thickened and became useful—but the shiver thinned the pissedness, made the pissedness seem less important. I felt warm, but less dangerous.

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“Kissed her!” Flowers said.

We banged fists.

“You figure out what’s the Side of Damage?” he said.

A thing I lead, I said.

“You’re talkin’ like a koan. Got something to show me?”

It’s on the music stand, I said, but it’s only three lines long.

“Don’t say
only
,” said Flowers. He said, “Right three lines—

specially they the openers—that’s big. They the right ones?”

I think so, I said.

But I was mistaken. I hadn’t even swapped love for damage yet, let alone made forever not always.

The right ones follow the table of contents, 496 pages ago.

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Esther Salt sat alone on her stoop without a jacket. From a block away, I could make our her shape, but her face was blurry—I couldn’t tell whether or not she looked pretty. Nor could I decide if I wanted her to. It seemed to be an important thing to decide in advance, so even though I was running a few minutes late for my meeting with her dad, I slowed my pace by 50% and kept my eyes on the sidewalk. The problem was I didn’t know which kind of love was truer: the kind where some girls would look pretty to me but I wouldn’t try to be with them because I loved June, or the kind where no one but June would look pretty.

The last I’d seen Esther was seven days earlier and she’d 737

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been pretty in the way Natalie Portman would be pretty if I took a time machine to the set of
The Professional
in 1994, when Portman was young enough to be my girlfriend
,
yet I somehow failed to realize Portman wasn’t Mathilda, budding schoolgirl assassin, but rather the actress playing Mathilda. I.e., the last I’d seen Esther, I’d believed she was meant to mother my sons.

I had just finished studying in the study with the Rabbi and there were still a few minutes to kill before dinner. Esther was playing backgammon with a couple of her sisters, Kinneret and Ayelet, at the dining room table. I pulled up a chair and, quick as a slap, I felt like a shmendrick who’d screwed up his life—Esther wouldn’t look at me, or even say hi.

It is true that I’d quit having conversations with her ever since she’d broken up with me, but it wasn’t because I hadn’t wanted to have conversations with her—I had only quit on my mom’s advice. She’d told me Esther would feel how gone from her I was and then decide to get back together with me. I didn’t understand how that plan could work if Esther didn’t try to talk to me first—if she didn’t even try, how could she know for sure that I refused to have a conversation with her?—but I trusted my mom and I’d stuck to the plan.

Kinneret said, “Gurion, do you know how to play sheish-beish?”
Sheishbeish
is backgammon, and Kinneret was the kindest and eldest of the Rabbi’s seven daughters. She had purple eyes and always bit her lip while squinting at me nicely from across the table at dinner whenever I asked Esther to pass me food and 738

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got ignored.

A little, I told her. I’ve played a couple times.

“Have you played with the cube?”

What cube? I said.

“What cube?” mumbled Esther, eyes on the board. “The doubling cube,” she mumbled. “It’s only half the game.” She was talking to herself as if she didn’t really want to say anything, as if not knowing about the doubling cube was so stupid to her that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t hold the contempt back—like the contempt was so fierce that it was able to force its way out of her mouth against her will.

“I know the cube!” Ayelet said. She didn’t say it mean, though—she said it excited and, right after she said it, she touched her right cheek to her right shoulder and made a pop-eyed crazyface and a hissing sound. Ayelet was seven, and very shy, and that was what she’d do when her voice came out louder than she’d planned. Esther used to do the crazyface hissing, too, but not because she’d been loud—Esther was never loud. She’d do it whenever we were alone, staring at each other and saying nothing, wondering what we were supposed to do next, which would have been kiss if she wasn’t Hasidic.

“When you play with the doubling cube,” said Kinneret, “you can form strategies of intimidation. Do you want to learn?”

“It’s fun,” said Ayelet.

“There’s no time to teach about the doubling cube,” said Esther.
Teach about—
she wouldn’t even put the
him
between the 739

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words. “Ema said five minutes til dinner.”

“Ema said ten minutes,” said Ayelet.

“Yes,” said Esther. “She said
ten
five minutes ago.”

“Ten means twenty when it’s dinner, anyway,” said Kinneret, and then she taught me about the doubling cube, and I saw that Esther was right—it was half the game. At the beginning, the cube didn’t belong to anyone, and either of the players could pick it up and use it. You used it to double the stakes. The best time was when you were at a slight advantage. If your opponent accepted the double you offered, the cube belonged to her, unless she decided to re-double. If she decided to redouble and you accepted, the cube became yours again. If at any point a double was offered and the player it was offered to didn’t take it, that player had to forfeit the game. I liked the cube.

We had dinner.

“She said
ten
five minutes ago,” was the last thing Esther had said that evening, one week earlier, six days before I fell in love with June.