Call It Sleep (33 page)

“W'ea's Wildy now?” someone asked.

“He's waitin' fuh Shaih an' Toik t' comm down,” Yonk looked significantly up at one of the houses. “He's gonna show em dey ain't de highest ones wad comms into de cheder.”

“I god t'ree poinders,” said Moish. “Who'll match me?”

“I'll play yuh.” Izzy had just cleaned out his opponent. “W'ea didja ged 'em? From de swipe?”

“Naa. Dey's two goils in my class, an' anudder kid—a goy. So dey all bought lollipops, an' de goy too. So I follered dem aroun' an' aroun' an' den w'en dey finished, dey trowed away de sticks. So I picked 'em up. Goys is dumb.”

“Lucky guy,” they said enviously.

It took more than luck though, as David very well knew. It took a great deal of patience. He had tried that method of collecting lollipop sticks himself, but it had proved too tedious. Anyway he didn't really have to do it. He happened to be bright enough to avoid punishment, and could read Hebrew as fast as anyone, although he still didn't know what he read. Translation, which was called Chumish, would come later.

“Yowooee!” The cry came from overhead this time. They looked up. Shaih and Toik, the two brothers who lived on the third floor back had climbed out on their fire-escapes. They were the only ones in the cheder privileged to enter the yard via the fire-escape ladders—and they made the most of it. The rest watched enviously. But they had climbed down only a few steps, when again the cry, and now from a great height—

“Yowooee!”

Everyone gasped. It was Wildy and he was on the roof!

“I tol' yuh I wuz gonna comm down higher den dem!” With a triumphant shout he mounted the ladder and with many a flourish climbed down.

“Gee, Wildy!” they breathed reverently—all except the two brothers and they eyed him sullenly.

“We'll tell de janitor on you.”

“I'll smack yuh one,” he answered easily, and turning to the rest. “Yuh know wad I c'n do if one o' youz is game. I betcha I c'n go up on de fawt' flaw an' I betcha I c'n grab hol' from dat wash-line an' I betcha I c'n hol' id till sommbody pulls me across t' de wash-pole an I betcha I c'n comm down!”

“Gee, Wildy!”

“An' somm day I'm gonna stott way over on Avenyuh C an' jump all de fences in de whole two blocks!”

“Gee!”

“Hey, guys, I'm goin' in.” Izzy had won the last of the pointers. “C'mon, I'm gonna give 'im.”

“How many yuh god?” They trooped after him.

“Look!” There was a fat sheaf of them in his hand.

They approached the reading table. The rabbi looked up.

“I've got pointers for you, rabbi,” said Izzy in Yiddish.

“Let me see them,” was the suspicious answer. “Quite a contribution you're making.”

Izzy was silent.

“Do you know my pointers were stolen yesterday?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Well, where did you get these?”

“I won them.”

“From whom?”

“From everybody.”

“Thieves!” he shook his hand at them ominously. “Fortunately for you I don't recognize any of them.”

IV

TWO months had passed since David entered the cheder. Spring had come and with the milder weather, a sense of wary contentment, a curious pause in himself as though he were waiting for some sign, some seal that would forever relieve him of watchfulness and forever insure his wellbeing. Sometimes he thought he had already beheld the sign—he went to cheder; he often went to the synagogue on Saturdays; he could utter God's syllables glibly. But he wasn't quite sure. Perhaps the sign would be revealed when he finally learned to translate Hebrew. At any rate, ever since he had begun attending cheder, life had leveled out miraculously, and this he attributed to his increasing nearness to God. He never thought about his father's job any longer. There was no more of that old dread of waiting for the cycle to fulfill itself. There no longer seemed to be any cycle. Nor did his mother ever appear to worry about his father's job; she too seemed reassured and at peace. And those curious secrets he had gleaned long ago from his mother's story seemed submerged within him and were met only at reminiscent street-corners among houses or in the brain. Everything unpleasant and past was like that, David decided, lost within one. All one had to do was to imagine that it wasn't there, just as the cellar in one's house could be conjured away if there were a bright yard between the hallway and the cellar-stairs. One needed only a bright yard. At times David almost believed he had found that brightness.

It was a few days before Passover. The morning had been so gay, warmer and brighter than any in the sheaf of Easter just past. Noon had been so full of promise—a leaf of Summer in the book of Spring. And all that afternoon he had waited, restless and inattentive, for the three o'clock gong to release him from school. Instead of blackboards, he had studied the sharp grids of sunlight that brindled the red wall under the fire-escapes; and behind his tall geography book, had built a sail of a blotter and pencil to catch the mild breeze that curled in through the open window. Miss Steigman had caught him, had tightly puckered her lips (the heavy fuzz about them always darkened when she did that) and screamed:

“Get out of that seat, you little loafer! This minute! This very minute! And take that seat near the door and stay there! The audacity!” She always used that word, and David always wondered what it meant. Then she had begun to belch, which was what she always did after she had been made angry.

And even in his new seat, David had been unable to sit still, had fidgeted and waited, fingered the grain of his desk, stealthily rolled the sole of his shoe over a round lead pencil, attempted to tie a hair that had fallen on his book into little knots. He had waited and waited, but now that he was free, what good was it? The air was darkening, the naked wind was spinning itself a grey conch of the dust and rubbish scooped from the gutter. The street-cleaner was pulling on his black rain-coat. The weather had cheated him, that's all! He couldn't go anywhere now. He'd get wet. He might as well be the first one in the cheder. Disconsolately, he crossed the street.

But how did his mother know this morning it was going to rain? She had gone to the window and looked out, and then she said, the sun is up too early. Well what if it—Whee!

Before his feet a flat sheet of newspaper, driven by a gust of damp wind, whipped into the air and dipped and fluttered languidly, melting into sky. He watched it a moment and then quickened his step. Above store windows, awnings were heaving and bellying upward, rattling. Yelling, a boy raced across the gutter, his cap flying before him.

“Wow! Look!” The shout made him turn around.

“Shame! Shame! Everybody knows your name.” A chorus of boys and girls chanted emphatically. “Shame! Shame! Everybody knows your name.”

Red and giggling a big girl was thrusting down the billow of her dress. Above plump, knock-kneed legs, a glimpse of scalloped, white drawers. The wind relenting, the dress finally sank. David turned round again, feeling a faint disgust, a wisp of the old horror. With what prompt spasms the mummified images in the brain started from their niches, aped former antics and lapsed. It recalled that time, way long ago. Knish and closet. Puh! And that time when two dogs were stuck together. Puh! Threw water that man. Shame! Shame!

“Sophe-e!” Above him the cry. “Sophe-e!”

“Ye-es mama-a!” from a girl across the street.

“Comm opstehs! Balt!”

“Awaa!”

“Balt or I'll give you! Nooo!”

With a rebellious shudder, the girl began crossing the street. The window slammed down.

Pushing a milk-stained, rancid baby carriage before them, squat buttocks waddled past, one arm from somewhere dragging two reeling children, each hooked by its hand to the other, each bouncing against the other and against their mother like tops, flagging and whipped. A boy ran in front of the carriage. It rammed him.

“Ow! Kencha see wea yuh goin?” He rubbed his ankle.

“Snott nuzz! Oll—balt a frosk, Oll—give!”

“Aaa! Buzjwa!”

A drop of rain spattered on his chin.

—It's gonna—

He flung his strap of books over his shoulder and broke into a quick trot.

—Before I get all wet.

Ahead of him, flying toward the shore beyond the East River, shaggy clouds trooped after their van. And across the river the white smoke of nearer stacks was flattened out and stormy as though the stacks were the funnels of a flying ship. In the gutter, wagon wheels trailed black ribbons. Curtains overhead paddled out of open windows. The air had shivered into a thousand shrill, splintered cries, wedged here and there by the sudden whoop of a boy or the impatient squawk of a mother. At the doorway to the cheder corridor, he stopped and cast one lingering glance up and down the street. The black sidewalks had cleared. Rain shook out wan tresses in the gathering dark. Against the piebald press of cloud in the craggy furrow of the west, a lone flag on top of a school-steeple blew out stiff as a key. In the shelter of a doorway, across the gutter, a cluster of children shouted in monotone up at the sky:

“Rain, rain, go away, come again some oddeh day. Rain, rain, go away, come again some oddeh day. Rain, rain—”

He'd better go in before the rest of the rabbi's pupils came. They'd get ahead of him otherwise. He turned and trudged through the dim battered corridor. The yard was gloomy. Wash-poles creaked and swayed, pulleys jangled. In a window overhead, a bulky, bare-armed woman shrilled curses at someone behind her and hastily hauled in the bedding that straddled the sills like bulging sacks.

“And your guts be plucked!” her words rang out over the yard. “Couldn't you tell me it was raining?”

He dove through the rain, skidded over the broken flagstones and fell against the cheder door. As he stumbled in, the rabbi, who was lighting the gas-jet, looked around.

“A black year befall you!” he growled. “Why don't you come in like a man?”

Without answering, he sidled meekly over to the bench beside the wall and sat down. What did he yell at him for? He hadn't meant to burst in that way. Gee! The growing gas-light revealed another pupil in the room whom he hadn't noticed before. It was Mendel. His neck swathed in white bandages, sickly white under the bleary yellow flicker of gas, he sat before the reading table, head propped by elbows. Mendel was nearing his bar-mitzvah but had never learned to read chumish because he had entered the cheder at a rather late age. He was lucky, so every one said, because he had a carbuncle on the back of his neck which prevented him from attending school. And so all week long, he had arrived first at the cheder. David wondered if he dared sit down beside him. The rabbi looked angry. However, he decided to venture it and crawled quietly over the bench beside Mendel. The pungent reek of medicine pried his nostrils.

—Peeuh! It stinks!

He edged away. Dull-eyed, droopy-lipped, Mendel glanced down at him and then turned to watch the rabbi. The latter drew a large blue book from a heap on the shelf and then settled himself on his pillowed chair.

“Strange darkness,” he said, squinting at the rain-chipped window. “A stormy Friday.”

David shivered. Beguiled by the mildness of noon, he had left the house wearing only his thin blue jersey. Now, without a fire in the round-bellied stove and without other bodies to lend their warmth to the damp room, he felt cold.

“Now,” said the rabbi stroking his beard, “this is the ‘Haftorah' to Jethro—something you will read at your bar mitzvah, if you live that long.” He wet his thumb and forefinger and began pinching the top of each page in such a way that the whole leaf seemed to wince from his hand and flip over as if fleeing of its own accord. David noted with surprise that unlike the rabbi's other books this one had as yet none of its corners lopped off. “It's the ‘Sedrah' for that week,” he continued, “and since you don't know any chumish, I'll tell you what it means after you've read it.” He picked up the pointer, but instead of pointing to the page suddenly lifted his hand.

In spite of himself, Mendel contracted.

“Ach!” came the rabbi's impatient grunt. “Why do you spring like a goat? Can I hit
you?
” And with the blunt end of the pointer, he probed his ear, his swarthy face painfully rippling about his bulbous nose into the margins of his beard and skull-cap. He scraped the brown clot of wax against the table leg and pointed to the page. “Begin, Beshnos mos.”

“Beshnos mos hamelech Uziyahu vaereh es adonoi,” Mendel swung into the drone.

For want of anything better to do, David looked on, vying silently with Mendel. But the pace soon proved too fast for him—Mendel's swift sputter of gibberish tripped his own laggard lipping. He gave up the chase and gazed vacantly at the rain-chipped window. In a house across the darkened yard, lights had been lit and blurry figures moved before them. Rain strummed on the roof, and once or twice through the steady patter, a muffled rumble filtered down, as if a heavy object were being dragged across the floor above.

—Bed on wheels. Upstairs. (His thoughts rambled absently between the confines of the drone of the voice and the drone of the rain.) Gee how it's raining. It won't stop. Even if he finishes, I can't go. If he read chumish, could race him, could beat him I bet. But that's because he has to stop … Why do you have to read chumish? No fun … First you read, Adonoi elahenoo abababa, and then you say, And Moses said you mustn't, and then you read some more abababa and then you say, mustn't eat in the traife butcher store. Don't like it any way. Big brown bags hang down from the hooks. Ham. And all kinds of grey wurst with like marbles in 'em. Peeuh! And chickens without feathers in boxes, and little bunnies in that store on First Avenue by the elevated. In a wooden cage with lettuce, and rocks, they eat too, on those stands. Rocks all colors. They bust 'em open with a knife and shake out ketchup on the snot inside. Yich! and long, black, skinny snakes. Peeuh! Goyim eat everything …