The Mystics of Mile End (4 page)

There was almost no light left in the sky by the time I got home. Dad and Sammy were in the kitchen. He was making dinner and she was setting the table.

“Why are your hands all covered in paint?” he asked me.

I stared down at my green hands and froze.

“You haven't been talking to that old quack down the street, have you? Because when I passed by his house this morning, I saw him sitting there with green paint.”

“I, um . . .”

“The man's delusional. One too many religious ideas gone to his head.” He frowned down at me. “Well? Were you with him, yes or no?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sammy shake her head, very slowly, from side to side.

“No.”

“Then why are your hands all covered in paint?”

“I'm working on a project? With Alex? From Normal School?”

“For what class?”

“Science?

“What's the project on?”

I froze again. But in the next second, Sammy was standing right beside me.

“Chlorophyll,” she said.

He looked at her. “Oh?”

“Yes,” she said. Then she stared down at her feet and added, “And just because Mr. Katz is religious, that doesn't make him delusional. He looks lonely. I feel sorry for him.”

“Is that right?” Dad said. But she didn't answer, so he just told me to wash my hands and then turned back to face the stove.

As I walked to the sink, I snuck a look at Sammy. I rolled my eyes in Dad's direction and her face cracked into a smile. I grinned. Me and my sister didn't just share the same nameless sickness. We also shared a secret language that only we could speak.

I
n Hebrew School, we spent most of the time listening to Mr. Glassman read the Torah out loud. He'd read a section, then try to get one of us to translate it into English. Because nobody ever wanted to do it, nobody ever volunteered, which meant lots of seconds passed without anybody saying anything, which made you wonder why Mr. Glassman didn't just call on someone and make them translate it like any normal teacher would. After a while, you realized Mr. Glassman didn't need to call on anyone because he sort of had his own trick, which was to just stare at us in perfect silence until finally, eventually, somebody cracked.

But that week the temperature shot up like crazy. Mr. Glassman, who wore his usual neat shirt and vest and tie even though it was a million degrees, had circles of sweat under his arms. I counted off seconds in my head. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty. After sixty-three seconds passed without anyone saying anything, Mr. Glassman did something he'd never done before. He closed his book and asked if we wanted, just this once, to hear a story instead.

Right away everyone yelled “Yes!” and slammed their books
shut. Mr. Glassman ran his fingers through his damp gray hair and smiled.

Rabbi Akiva, he said, lived two thousand years ago, but he wasn't always called Rabbi. For the first forty years of his life he was just plain Akiva, a poor shepherd who didn't know how to read or what the alphabet was or even how to pray. He said he was so jealous of the Torah scholars in his village that if he'd had the chance he would have bitten them like a wild donkey. But then one day, when he was out with his sheep, he saw a big rock lying in a riverbed and a tiny stream of water dripping onto it from up above. It was a very slow drip, but Akiva saw that over many years that drip had worn down the rock. Now there was a hollow space in it big enough for a pool of water to collect. He thought: If a drop of water can make its way into a stone, the Torah can make its way into my heart! The next day, he went to school with his youngest child to learn how to read the alphabet. By the end of his life, he had the most knowledge and the most students of any Torah scholar in the world.

That night, at dinner, Dad asked again what me and Sammy were learning in school. He wanted to know how Sammy was liking
King Lear
so far, but she just stared down at her skirt, so instead I told him all about Ms. Davidson and how she went for bike rides in the middle of the night and wore happy colors and really made you think. After a few minutes, he yawned. I could tell he was extremely bored but I kept on talking because that was the only way, because if I kept on talking, word after word, drop after drop, sooner or later a space would open up.

O
n my way home from school in the last week of May, I saw Mr. Katz sitting on his lawn in between the old oak tree and a second tree trunk that seemed to have sprouted up overnight. But when I got closer, I saw that it wasn't a real trunk at all, it was
the hundreds of toilet paper rolls that we'd painted brown tied together with dental floss. I went over and said, “Hello, Mr. Katz.”

“Hello, Lev.”

“Are you making a tree, by any chance?”

After a very long time, he said, “Yes.” Then he grabbed my wrist and pulled down hard so I kind of fell onto my knees on the grass. He whispered, “Can you keep a secret?”

I rubbed my wrist and said, “Yes.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“This is not an ordinary tree I am making.”

I dropped my wrist and said, “What kind of tree is it?”

“This,” he said, “this is the Tree of Knowledge.”

T
he next day, I decided to ask Mr. Glassman about the Tree of Knowledge, because all I knew was that it was in the Garden of Eden and that eating from it was what got Adam and Eve kicked out. I waited for Torah class to be over, and then I went up to him and said, “Mr. Glassman, I've been thinking about how you said it's never too early to start preparing for your bar mitzvah, and I was wondering if I could study with you some days after school?”

Smiling, he pinched my cheek and said, “
Geshmack!
” He told me we could start right away, so I followed him home.

When Mrs. Glassman opened the door, she said, “Two times I get to see Lev in the same month,
tu-tu-tu kineahora,
but if I knew my Chaim was going to be schlepping you here every day I would prepare for you more things to eat!” She told me to sit at the kitchen table and brought us hot tea even though it was a zillion degrees outside. She said, “Drink!” so I drank.

Mr. Glassman asked when my Hebrew birthday was so he could calculate when my bar mitzvah would fall during the year. That way he'd know what Torah portion I'd have to read. I said, “I don't
actually know when it is because my dad says that calendar's based on a backward idea of when the world was created, which scientists are still iffy about but which was definitely more than six thousand years ago.”

Mr. Glassman raised his eyebrows, then shook his head and sighed.

Since what I really wanted to learn about was the Tree of Knowledge, I asked Mr. Glassman if we could study Genesis instead. His face lit up. He said, “Begin at the beginning, excellent idea. I see you're just as thorough as your sister!”

We started reading the first chapter of Genesis, but after an hour we had only gotten up to the part about the grass being created. Even though I wanted to ask about the Tree right away, Mr. Glassman could see the toilet paper roll version of it right from his window and I didn't want to make him suspicious that maybe I was trying to help Mr. Katz.

The reason why was that Mr. Glassman was not the Hasidic kind of Jew that believes in personal miracles and prayers full of dancing and curls that bounce at the sides of your face. He was the Misnaged kind of Jew that believes in logic and straight lines, like the lines of his shirt and vest and tie, like his combed gray hair. Once when I came over after Hebrew School, Mr. Glassman said that Mr. Katz was a nice person, but he was all faith and no knowledge. What good was one without the other? An animal also had faith! Mrs. Glassman poked him in the ribs when he said that, but I could tell from her face she thought he was right.

That's how I knew I had to be patient and come back as many times as it took. I didn't mind because Mrs. Glassman's rugelach was the best in the neighborhood. And even though she talked to me for nine gazillion hours before letting me leave, asking questions like “You are liking math class?” and “You have learned about Fibonacci numbers?” and “A syllogism, you know what it is, yes?
No? How can you not know?” she only pinched my cheeks three times.

Luckily it took me just a few seconds to get home because the Glassmans' house and our house were so close they were practically touching. Actually there was so little space between them that when we were little Dad used to always tell me and Sammy to keep it down, noise traveled easily through the windows and he was sure the Glassmans could hear us. I pointed out that
we
never heard any voices coming from
their
house, and noise travels both ways, but Dad just said that must be because the Glassmans talk very quietly. I didn't want to tell him he was wrong, but I knew for a fact that wasn't true, because sometimes when Mr. and Mrs. Glassman talked to me their voices were so loud I could feel it in my teeth.

As soon as I opened our front door, I knew right away Sammy was already home. I could hear her voice coming from her room. She was chanting in Hebrew, so I knew it was the Torah portion she was preparing to read at the bat mitzvah next month.

I crept into my room quietly so that she wouldn't hear me and get embarrassed or mad. I clicked the door shut and held my breath for nineteen seconds straight, and she kept on chanting. But then Dad came home, and the second she heard his voice in the hallway she stopped.

He called, “Samara?” and she said, “Yeah?” and he said, “Would you help me get dinner started?” and she said, “Okay.” I heard Dad ask, “How about cheeseburgers?” so I ran into the hallway to say, “Yes!” but when I saw Sammy's face I said, “Ye—No, could we have grilled cheese instead?” When Dad went into the kitchen, Sammy gave me a funny look, like maybe she could tell that I could tell that she was trying to keep kosher in secret.

T
he second the bell rang for lunch, I knew something was up. All the kids jumped up from their desks, got their lunches
from their lockers, and raced out to the empty lot behind the school. Gabe was in the lead and I could tell he had something hidden in his jacket, because the corner of it was peeking out, a lighter blue against the dark blue of his ripped-up jeans.

Alex was taking his time getting his lunch out of his locker. I told him to hurry up and he asked why and I said to just do it and he asked why so I pulled him by the sleeve and rushed with him outside. I had a very tight feeling in my stomach, and once we reached the empty lot it took me about three milliseconds to understand why.

Gabe was standing at the far end, near where the grade sixes usually played dodgeball. Swarming around him were twenty kids from our class, and they were all pushing and shoving at each other to get a better look. The thing they were trying to get a better look at was in Gabe's right hand, and the thing Gabe's right hand was holding was—

“The Secret Diary of Alex Caufin,” announced Gabe, and the entire class cheered their heads off. “Who wants to hear what this loser
really
thinks of us?” Again the kids roared. Very slowly, with a huge grin on his face, Gabe opened the journal to the first page.

He frowned. The kids waited. He turned the page. The kids waited. He flipped to the middle of the notebook. One kid shouted, “Come on already!” and even Dean shouted, “Yeah!” but Gabe just scowled. I turned around to look at Alex but he was walking up to Gabe and Dean. Half the kids spilled onto one side of him and half the kids spilled onto the other. I couldn't figure out why he looked so calm, but then I saw the journal in Gabe's hand and remembered what I'd seen on the first page, which was line after line of numbers. The whole entire thing was written in code, and that's why Gabe couldn't read it, and that's why his face was turning so red!

Alex stretched out his hand and said, “I believe you have something that belongs to me.”

Behind Gabe's shoulder, Dean grinned and raised his fist like maybe he was planning to give Alex something else instead. But just then Ms. Davidson came outside and we heard her voice call out, “What's going on here?”

Dean lowered his fist. Alex snatched his journal back. The two of us went inside.

Alex seemed proud of himself, but all day long my stomach stayed tight because I could see Gabe shooting us laser looks of hate out of the corners of his shiny black too-small eyes.

Which was why, hours later, after I'd gone to bed and crawled under the covers, I turned on my flashlight and took out my journal and read through all the pages I'd filled so far. I wanted to make sure there was nothing that would be too embarrassing if Gabe and Dean ever decided to read it out loud in front of the entire class.

Luckily I didn't have much to worry about because mostly what I'd written was lists. For example, one list was called “Very Important Qualities According to My Father,” which was an excellent list even though the title was maybe not 100 percent true since some of the qualities were thought up by me and not Dad. I checked it for embarrassing details just in case.

VERY IMPORTANT QUALITIES ACCORDING TO MY FATHER:

                
1.  Highly intelligent

                
2.  Good cook

                
3.  Easy on the eyes

                
4.  Likes watching TV on Friday nights

                
5.  Likes playing board games on Saturday mornings

                
6.  Very funny

                
7.  Interested in Judaism but not too interested

                
8.  Smells nice

That list looked okay to me. I still wished I'd had the idea to write everything in code, but so far there was nothing too bad and I figured I was probably safe for now.