The Instructions (121 page)
Authors: Adam Levin
“They were coming for Patrick Drucker.”
You were in their way, and you didn’t know what they would do. You could not have known.
“And?”
And
what
? You should have stopped them.
“I should have killed them, you’re saying.”
They might have done the same to you.
“I fell and they left me alone.”
You didn’t know they
would
, though.
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“And I didn’t know they wouldn’t. To pre-emptively—”
They didn’t leave your client alone, I said.
“My
client
?” he said. “You would expect me to— What can you possibly think of me, Gurion? Do you think we’re that different?”
Who?
“You and I.”
I don’t understand you.
“Nor I you. Patrick Drucker is a Nazi in a cheap suit. You would expect me to kill Jews—
murder
Jews—to protect a Nazi?”
I sat where I’d stood. I sat on the floor, not knowing how to answer. Because that was, actually, what I’d have expected of him. It hadn’t
been
what I’d have expected—not for the last ten years it hadn’t; not until the previous few hours. Not until the expectation was useful. When I saw him get hurt I was angry at him for getting hurt, at least as angry at him as I was at those who’d hurt him, and at Adonai. I was angry because it is right to be angry at people who are guilty. People who are guilty should have—which means that they
could
have—done something different from what they did. To be guilty, you have to have had some control over the thing you did, and if he had had some control, my father… if he had
deserved
the enmity of those Israelites… if he had brought it on himself… if he had
gotten himself attacked
, then it only followed that in the future he could
avoid
getting himself attacked. In the future, he could keep himself safe. And I wanted to believe he could keep himself safe. That was why I had decided he was just as his attackers 1138
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claimed he was; it would have been easier to love him despite his being an enemy of the Israelites than to have to worry about him getting killed for being righteous; less world-shattering to lose my trust in him than my faith in Adonai; more tolerable to be angry at him than to fear for him. And if these reflections seem too complicated for me to have had in the middle of an argument with my parents, while my mother, who was rising by then, puffing up warriorstyle to deliver me a rhetorical slap that would not, as it would turn out, bring me pain, but relief—if this all seems too complicated a stream of thoughts for me to think in the moment my entire understanding of the previous six months of my life was getting re-arranged, that’s because it was. Too complicated. I didn’t think these things then, not all of them, not nearly, and certainly not in this order. All I thought was: You are good, Aba, and they trampled you anyway. And struck as I was by the implications, I only managed to speak a bastardized version of the predicate.
I said, They trampled you anyway ≠ “But those Israelites you wouldn’t kill to save a Nazi trampled you and so you should have killed them.” I wasn’t arguing at all, only lamenting, but judging by my mother’s response, it must have sounded like arguing.
She said, “Yes they did, Gurion. And Jews every one of them.
They ran right over him. They did not give a fuck about your father, or you, or your mother.” Who was leaning at me now, my mother, yelling these words.
“Baby,” said my dad.
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“No.” my mother said. “He is in the wrong, Judah, and it is not cute. It is not smart. Now is not the time to speak softly.
You are terribly wrong to say such things to your father, Gurion.
You are being heartless and reckless and abominably stupid. I do not know who you ate dinner with tonight. I do not know with whom you ate dinner while your aba and I were at the hospital because Flowers did not seem to catch their names, but all of their heads, he said, were covered, and so I assume these were boys you went to Schechter with. Yes? Boys you call your friends? Are they still your friends, Gurion?”
They’re my friends, I said, but—
“But
nothing
. Who do you think it was at the courthouse?
Whose blood, Gurion? Whose cousins and uncles? Whose older brothers? Whose Jewish fucking parents?”
I know, I said.
“You know, yet you are friends with them? After what their parents did to your father—and never mind what has been done to you—after what their parents did to your father, you call them your friends?”
They can’t be held—
“They cannot be held to account for the crimes of their parents?” she said. “Is that what the fuck you were going to say?”
Yes, I said.
“Are you sure you want to say that? Are you sure it is true? Are you sure they cannot be held to account? Because if they cannot be held to account, Gurion, I do not understand why you would 1140
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have them suffer. I do not understand, if they cannot be held to account, why you would have your father turn your friends into orphans.”
I wouldn’t, I said.
“No?”
No, I said.
“No but what?” she said.
No but nothing, I said. I said, I was wrong. You’re right. I was saying stupid things, Ema. I was doing everything you said I was doing.
“Are you lying to me?”
No.
“Are you still angry?”
Not at Aba, I said.
“Are you still angry at me?”
No, I said.
“So enough yelling,” she said.
I’d never watched myself cry, so I didn’t know, but I thought I must be one of those people who smiles before he cries, because my mom sat next to me on the floor and did stuff to my hair while my dad kept reassuring me that everything would be alright, and I wasn’t crying at all. I was smiling so hard my face hurt.
An entire night and then some would pass before I’d learn about 1141
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the Gurionic War, weeks on top of that before I’d start writing
The Instructions
. By the time I left the kitchen, though, I already knew the first of the blessings of both of them, and it was the first thing I wrote when I got to my room.
There is damage. There was always damage and there will be more damage, but not always. Were there always to be more damage, damage would be an aspect of perfection. We would all be angels, one-legged and faceless, seething with endless, hopeless praise.
Bless Adonai for making us better than angels. Blessed is Adonai for making us human.
I saved the file, hit PRINT, and was about to get a fresh address from which to send email to the scholars when I noticed how late it was, and that June hadn’t called. I worried she wouldn’t, so I called her.
“Are you still in love with me?” she said.
More than ever, I said.
“Because of what I told you?”
No.
“In spite of it?”
Regardless of it.
“You always say the right thing,” she said. “You should write me a book.”
I said, Tomorrow I want you to bring your gun to school.
She said, “I always bring my gun to school. I love you.” Then 1142
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she hung up.
Two minutes later I had my new address, and ten after that I’d written the “Sudden Holiday” email. Still, I spent an hour hesitating before I sent it. Not because of what I’d written—I liked what I had written. If it was possible, as Emmanuel had argued, that the messiah needed to be proclaimed the messiah before he could do those things the messiah was supposed to do; and if it was good to declare you were in love prior to the moment just before you died (and I was beginning to think it was more than good; I was beginning to think it was necessary, beginning to suspect it could not be true
without
the declaration = starting to believe that before you could actually
be
in love, you needed to
say
you were in love); if Adonai’s hand could be forced with words, then there was no reason why a holiday, let alone a potential holiday that was acknowledged as such, couldn’t or shouldn’t be announced in advance of the events it might commemorate.
What made me hesitate was the new address. Whether or not I should use it. I already had an address the scholars’ parents hadn’t blocked, and Ben Brodsky was well beyond need of my protection. If anyone did end up figuring out how I originally got hold of that Kalisch email (it wouldn’t be that hard; Ben’s penchant for password-cracking had been notorious), what difference would it make? Yes, a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid, but not when the kid being told on is, himself, dead. Ben’s death had done to Ben what death always did to dead kids: Ben’s death had all but sainted him. The rev-1143
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elation that he’d hacked Unger’s mailbox—whether Brodsky’s, Emmanuel’s, Rabbi Salt’s, or anyone else’s—wouldn’t sully his memory, but enliven it, fondly reminding the rememberers of the extra-bright sparkle in Ben Brodsky’s eyes they might or might not have actually witnessed, let alone appreciated, while he was alive.
And I wasn’t ashamed that I’d forwarded Kalisch’s email to those listservs, either, much less incapable of describing why I’d done so. In fact, I did describe it. At one point during the course of my hour-long hesitation, I became convinced enough that I should come clean that I wrote half an alternate version of
“Sudden Holiday” in which I explained what I’d hoped to gain:
…I forwarded Kalisch’s email because I wanted the elders of Israelite communities outside Chicago to learn of the persecution I was suffering at the hands of our headmasters. I believed that if the elders knew of it, they would stop it. I believed, scholars, that they would stand up for me and convince your parents to embrace our friendship. I believed we would again be allowed to study Torah together.
It was my mistake to expect such help: an honest mistake, but mine nonetheless. The Israelites of Chicago, especially those other headmasters to whom Kalisch originally addressed the email—
they were the ones who should have stepped in to help us. To go outside of our community for help, even if only into the wider Israelite community; that is always a mistake. I know that now more than ever.
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I stopped writing there, unsure of how to begin the next paragraph. Certainly the scholars would want to know why I took so long to tell them what I’d done, and that would have to be the next thing I addressed. And maybe they would accept what I told them. Maybe they would accept that I had to protect Ben.
And maybe they would allow that, although Ben had been dead since July—that although it had been four months since last he’d required my protection—no opportunity or need to let them know I was [email protected] had arisen in the last four months, and maybe they wouldn’t hold against me my silence during those months. Maybe they wouldn’t question any of it. Maybe they would just assume that I had done what was right at the time. Or that I hadn’t done what was wrong.
Maybe they would believe that I had done what seemed proper in my eyes, and maybe that what was proper in my eyes, despite its failure, was proper nonetheless. Or maybe not.
But even if they didn’t feel the slightest bit betrayed, and even if they saw that my reasons for forwarding Kalisch’s email were good, they would see that my doing so had been a mistake. How could they avoid seeing that? I said so outright, and there was no way to avoid saying so outright, not without lying.
Not without blaming people who weren’t deserving of blame.
It really
wasn’t
the fault of those elders outside the community that they’d failed to step in to help me. People don’t step in to help you, not from outside. That’s just not the way the world works. And overall, that’s probably a good thing. They didn’t 1145
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know me, those elders. They didn’t know Kalisch or Unger.
All they knew was that Kalisch and Unger were headmasters of Israelite schools, were pedigreed, authorized by the Israelites of Chicago to exert certain powers. And maybe they’d heard of my dad, probably they’d heard of my dad, and certainly whatever they’d heard wouldn’t have been good. Why would wise Israelites step in to help a stranger, the son of a reputed self-hating Jew whose own schoolmasters had called him dangerous, had called him detrimental to the Israelites? They wouldn’t.
And they shouldn’t be expected to. To insist otherwise might have been convenient for me, but it would have been a lie, and I wasn’t going to start lying to the scholars. So what, then?
So I made a mistake back in June. It was a forgivable mistake, and taking as long as I’d taken to admit to it—that was forgivable too. But if I could make one mistake here, I could make another there. And it was easy to understand how they might see it that way, the scholars. They might think, “Gurion made a mistake in June. How do we know he’s not making a mistake in November?” And then they might not do what I wanted them to do.
And I saw it was better they be misled by me than not led by me. Nothing was worth the risk of failing to protect my father.
I could send them an email from FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL
some other time.
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Sent: November 16, 2006, 11:51 PM Central-Standard Time Subject: SUDDEN HOLIDAY
CC: NEW SCHECHTER LIST, NORTHSIDE HEBREW DAY LIST
Scholars,
If we are just, then tomorrow a new holiday will arise. I believe we are just, and so I am canceling school for all of those Israelites who wish to observe. Services will be held in the field across the street from Aptakisic Junior High School, in the valley between the two hills. Directions to get there from Schechter are attached.