Authors: David Grossman
“The timing is wrong, Gabi.” He sighs and sneaks a glance at his watch. “Be patient. I can't decide a thing like this under pressure.”
“I have waited patiently for twelve years. I'm not going to wait anymore.” Silence. He doesn't answer. Her eyes are brimming over. Oh, please control yourself, Gabi, you hear?
“Jacob, answer me to my face: is it yes or no?”
Silence. Her double chin is trembling. Her lips twitch. If she starts crying now, she's doomed. And so am I.
“Because if the answer is no, I will get up and leave you, Jacob. This time for good. I mean it!” And she pounds the table with her fist as the tears flow down her puffy face. Mascara trickles over her freckles and collects in the creases around her mouth. Dad frowns in the direction of the window. He can't bear to see her cry, or maybe it's the sight of her swollen eyes and her quivering cheeks that he can't bear.
No, she is not pretty at this moment. And it's so cruel, too, because if she were the least bit attractive, if she had a sweet little mouth, for instance, or a turned-up nose, he might suddenly have fallen in love with her one good feature. The tiniest beauty mark is sometimes enough to win a man's heart, even if the woman in question is no queen of outward beauty. But Gabi has no beauty mark, I'm sorry to say.
“Okay, I understand.” She groans through the red scarf, which has recently served a loftier purpose. “What a fool I've been to think you could change.”
“Shhh ⦔ he begs her, glancing around. I definitely hope everybody in the café is staring at him now. That all the cooks and waiters come hurrying out of the kitchen and stand around with their arms folded over their aprons, glaring at him. If there's one thing that scares my dad, it's a scene. “LookâuhâGabi,” he tries to soothe her. Actually
he seems more gentle now, either because of all the people around or because he senses that she's serious this time. “Please, give me a little more time to think about it, okay?”
“Why? So that when I'm fifty you can ask me to give you more time again? And what if you decide to tell me it's over when I'm fifty? Who'll look at me then? I want to be a mother, Jacob!” People are staring now and he wishes he were dead, but Gabi continues: “I have so much love in me to give a child, and to give to you, too! Haven't I done well so far as Nonny's mother? Won't you try to understand my side of it, too?”
Even during our rehearsals, she would get carried away sometimes and start crying and pleading, as if I were Dad. Then she'd get hold of herself and tell me, red-faced, that certain things were inappropriate for children my age to hear, although it didn't matter much, really, since I already knew everything anyway.
I did not know everything, though I was learning a lot.
Gabi rolls up the soggy paper napkins and wads them into the ashtray. She wipes away the last traces of mascara from her swollen eyes.
“Today is Sunday,” she says, struggling to keep her voice firm. “The bar mitzvah is next Saturday. You have until next Sunday morning, a full week, to decide.”
“Are you giving me an ultimatum? This isn't something you can settle with threats, Gabi! I thought you were smarter than that.” His voice is quiet, but the furrow of rage between his eyes grows ominously deeper.
“I don't have any strength left, Jacob. For twelve years I've been smart, and look at me, I'm still alone. Maybe being stupid works better.”
Dad says nothing. His red face is redder than ever.
“Come on, let's drive back to work,” she says hoarsely. “And by the way, if I've guessed your answer correctly, you'd better start looking for a new secretary, too. I'm going to break off all contact with you. Oh yes.”
“LookâuhâGabi ⦔ says Dad again. He can't think of anything else to say. “LookâuhâGabi.”
“Until next Sunday, then.” Gabi cuts him off, stands up, and walks out of the café.
She's leaving us.
She's leaving me.
In the train my arms and legs break out of “protective custody.” Emergency, emergency, the painted words scream out at me from the red sign above the little lever. The train is carrying me farther and farther away from where my life is just about to be destroyed. I cover my ears and shout, “Amnon Feuerberg! Amnon Feuerberg!” as though someone else were warning me not to touch the lever, trying to save me from myself, someone like a father, or a teacher, or a distinguished educator, or maybe even the head of a reformatory. “Amnon Feuerberg! Amnon Feuerberg!” But nothing will help me now. I'm all alone. Abandoned. I should never have left home. I must return at once. And I stagger toward the lever and reach out. My fingers stretch toward it, because this truly is an emergency.
But just as I am about to pull with all my might, the compartment door opens and in walk two men, a policeman and a prisoner, and both of them stand there, staring in astonishment.
I meanâa real policeman and a real prisoner.
The policeman was a wiry guy with a nervous look in his eyes. The prisoner was bigger, burlier. He smiled at me brightly and said, “Mornin', kid! Off to visit your grandma?”
I wasn't sure it was legal to answer him. Anyway, why grandma? Did I look like the kind of kid who would visit his grandma, like Little Red Riding-Hood or something?
“No talking to the prisoner!” barked the policeman, severing the invisible strings between us with his skinny hand.
I sat down. I didn't know what to do. I tried not to look, but naturally, the harder I tried, the more I wanted to. They had an anxious air. Something was wrong. The policeman kept checking their tickets all the time and scratching his head. The prisoner checked the tickets and scratched his head, too. They looked as if they were playing charades, acting out the expression “to rack your brains.”
“Why did you have to go and buy separate seats?” grumbled the prisoner, and the policeman shrugged his shoulders. The man at the ticket counter, he explained, didn't say that the tickets were for separate seats. He, the policeman, had assumed they would have adjacent seats, because no one in his right mind would sell separate seats to a pair like them, and as he said the words “a pair like us,” he raised his right hand, which was cuffed to the prisoner's left.
It was an odd sort of scene. They looked like a couple of cartoon characters, the prisoner with his striped shirt and cap, and the policeman
with his large hat slipping over his eyes. They stood in the aisle together, rocking indecisively to the rhythm of the train. This, for some reason, made me nervous.
At first they tried to sit in their reserved places, the prisoner beside me, the policeman facing us, but they were obliged to lean forward on account of the handcuffs. And then all at once they stood up and started rocking again, which seemed to relax them so much that the prisoner's head drooped down, brushing against the policeman's shoulder, and the policeman appeared to be about to fall asleep. I wanted out of there, fast; I kept wishing there were an adult around, because those two didn't seem quite like adults to me, or like kids either, for that matter; they were sort of undefinable.
The policeman shook himself out of his peculiar lethargy and whispered something to the prisoner. I couldn't hear what exactly, but I knew it was about me, because the prisoner threw me a sidelong glance: “No way!” he shouted in a whisper. “You can't do that! These seats are reserved!”
The policeman tried to calm him, pointing out that since the car was practically empty, it would be perfectly all right under the circumstances to sit in unreserved seats. But the prisoner wouldn't hear of it. “Rules are rules!” he bristled. “If you and I don't obey them, who will?” And as he stamped his foot indignantly, I noticed the ball and chain around his ankle, just like in a book.
I'm getting out of here, I thought. This is not a good place to be.
“Who's going to notice if we sit in somebody else's seat for a couple of minutes?” the policeman flashed back in an angry whisper, with an ingratiating smile at me, the crooked smile of a conscience-stricken jailer. “You won't report us, kiddo, will you?”
I could only shake my head in reply, but I noted the “kiddo” and held it against him.
And they sat down to the right and left of me.
Why, with a whole car to themselves, did they have to sandwich me in like that? Their wrists, double cuffed, were practically on my lap. I was pretty scared. They seemed to be up to something; they were trying
to intimidate me, but at the same time they were ignoring me. There was a long silence. My eyes kept darting back to my knees, over which two arms were swinging to the rhythm of the train, one hairy and thin, the other smooth and solid, the arm of the law and the arm of the lawbreaker, with the arm of the law looking distinctly weaker.
What was there to be afraid of, though? I mean, the law was on my side, practically on top of me, in fact, and yet I felt as if I were falling into a mysterious trap, as if those two were implicating me in some conspiracy.
But now they seemed to relax a little. The policeman leaned back and hummed to himself, twiddling his mustache with the fingers of his free hand as he strained to reach the high notes. The prisoner stared out the window at the passing scenery, the rocky hillsides of Jerusalem, and heaved a sigh.
“If someone arouses your suspicion, keep cool and wait. Don't talk too much. Let him do the talking and go about his business while you sit tight. All you do is quietly lay a trap for him and eventually he'll reveal his intentions.” That's what I was taught by Dad, my guide in this particular field. I took a deep breath. Here was my big chance to test myself in a real-life situation. I would ignore them, pretend everything was normal, until they made their first mistake.
Look to the right. Look to the left. There they sat. The whole thing seemed like a huge mistake, but I still couldn't figure out what it was.
Okay, I have to get ready for the meeting with Uncle Samuel, I told myself. Because last year he talked at me for two whole hours, and I didn't think I could go through that again. For two whole hours I watched his pouting mouth open and close under his mustache, until I could see it over his mustache, too. I was undoubtedly the subject of every article he'd ever published. For months, for years, he had been sitting in his office, writing against me. I bet he even kept a portrait of me on his desk with the legend:
Wanted Dead or Alive by the Ministry of Education
. And now I would be falling right into his handsâa man like him would never miss such an opportunity. And his stuffy office would fill up with puffy pairs of lips opening and closing and spouting
out more and more uncles of the puffy-lipped variety. Books and journals fluttered around me and rustled to the rhythm of my name. I was afraid I might die there of didactic poisoning.
I couldn't make out what he was saying anymore. He seemed to be accusing me of following the prophets of Baal and Astarte, or of taking part in the seventeenth-century pogroms of Chmielnicki. He had the whole of history on his side, and I would have confessed to anything.
Finally, after two mustachioed hours, I remembered Gabi's words of advice. “Cry,” she had whispered in my ear the night before. “If things become unbearable, start blubbering and see what happens.”
Look to the left. Look to the right. Nothing. The policeman and the prisoner were sitting perfectly still, staring off in opposite directions. Maybe there was nothing unusual going on here, after all. Maybe I was simply nervous about traveling alone. Or maybe they, too, had learned how to wage a war of nerves.
Uncle Samuel, I prompted myself; remember how it was last time you visited him.
I had never had any difficulty crying myself blue, and with Uncle ranting at me there, I was pretty miserable. It was easy enough to cough up the bitter lump of all that had happened to me, or that I had been told, or that I longed for.
I started sobbing, soft little sobs at first. And to make myself even sadder, I thought about the things Dad used to say, like, that he didn't know what to do with me, just when I seemed to be growing up I would suddenly regress, and how had a man like him produced a son like me? And he was right, but didn't he know how hard I was trying? Then I started to cry in earnest, because nothing ever comes out the way I mean it to. Even my sadness didn't come out the way I meant it to, crashing into the spectacle of Uncle Samuel's feet in the sandals he always wore over heavy gray socks, and that tie around his neck, even in summer, and his Terylene trousers worn ragged by the generations of pupils reared upon his kneesâhow sad yet comical it all seemed.
So I found myself laughing and crying, blubbering and sniveling, half for real, half not, experiencing a strangely pleasing blend of emotions, as though eating chocolate behind the dentist's back, and I sobbed with
remorse, self-pity, and overwhelming gratitude before this courageous man who was fighting single-handedly to save my wicked soul â¦
Uncle Samuel stopped talking. He gazed at me, his face gently radiant. Through the dimness I could see the glow of an awestruck smile over his mustache. “Well well,” he muttered, his hand fluttering tentatively over my head. “I never thought my words would have such an effect on you ⦠the simple outpouring of a fervent heart.” And suddenly he thundered “Yempa!,” which I took to be the victory cry of a distinguished educator over the forces of darkness. He rubbed his hands together and left the room. From the hall he called again, in that same curiously lighthearted way, to his housekeeper, Mrs. Yempa, and asked her to look in on me and help me calm down.
But I had resorted to tears already during the previous Shilhavization. What would I do this time? Gabi had whispered no new secrets in my ear to help me face Uncle today, large as life.
She was alone with Dad now. She was going to leave us.
I couldn't sit still between the two silent weirdos anymore. I had to get up right away, that is I tried to, but startled them to their feet, so that they had to raise their handcuffed fists together to let me by. They stood in my way, swaying drowsily again like a pair of droopy-lidded ducklings, till in my exasperation I blurted, “Hey, why don't we just switch places so the two of you can sit together?”