The Instructions (25 page)

On the ninth Monday, my mother couldn’t seem to get her cigarette lit. She flicked and flicked at her lighter, and no flame arose, and she bit her lip and glared at the lighter, as if trying to scare it into working. After a minute of glaring, she flicked some more, but still no flame arose and she bit her lip and tried more glaring.

It was only after my mother’s third failure to light her cigarette that my father—by now resigned almost to the point of total blindness by the “stupid” idea that he’d need to come up with the right thing to
say
before approaching her—felt a poke in his finger from the ballpoint in his pocket with which he’d stabbed himself while replacing the lighter he’d only just a few seconds earlier used on the cigarette presently stuck between his lips—a cigarette he hadn’t even realized he was smoking—and saw his moment. Lighter in hand, he leapt from his bench, raced across the street, stumbled on the curb.

My mother started laughing.

My father got his footing, glowed red through his beard. “You had better luck with matches,” he said to my mother. He held out his lighter.

My mother lit up—one flick—with her own.

“Understand, Gurion,” my mother once explained, “that most things between people do not work out according to plan, and so when they do, it can fill you with joy. I was not laughing at your father for stumbling. I was laughing because I had been waiting for weeks for him to approach me and—”

Why didn’t you approach him? I said.

“Because I did not want to. Men approach women all the time.

That is how men are. If a man approaches a woman, she will only welcome him if she is interested in
him
. If a woman approaches a 227

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man, though, the man may become interested by the fact of the approach itself, and I did not want your father to ever wonder if it was
because
I approached him that he fell in love with me. I wanted for him to have no doubts. So you see, I was laughing because we had been noticing one another for eight weeks, and still he had not approached me, and it had been making me crazy since the Wednesday of the third week, at which time I saw he needed an impetus to approach, and I developed my plan. I decided to use a lighter for my cigarettes, thinking: If I use a lighter, my lighter can run out of fuel. If my lighter runs out of fuel, he can come across the street and offer to light my cigarette with
his
lighter.”

I said, I don’t get why you couldn’t just run out of matches, though.

She said, “If you use an opaque lighter, such as the one I was using, you cannot tell how much fuel it contains, and so it says little about you if you run out of fuel. On the other hand, it is stupid to run out of matches, Gurion. It is no hard problem to look in the box before you leave the house and count your matches. If you do not have enough matches, you take more matches or you buy more matches or you suffer your stupidity. I did not want to look stupid.

Now, if during those first three weeks, I had not felt, from all the way across the street, a certain thrill pass through your father whenever I lit a cigarette, then I might have dropped my matches in a puddle, rendering them useless, but I suspected—and correctly, according to him—that the source of his thrill was the vision of grace that is witnessed in any person—let alone one who you are falling in love with—who can light a cigarette on the first try with a match in the wind. It always impressed me—that is why I learned 228

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to do it. To drop my matches in a puddle, though—that would be clumsy. And clumsiness, though it can at times be endearing, as it was when your father stumbled on the curb, can at other times, especially if the person who is clumsy has previously struck you as graceful, be very disappointing. In any case, ever since switching to the lighter, I had been waiting for it to run out of fuel. I never used a lighter habitually, and I assumed, for whatever reason, that they could not possibly last longer than two or three weeks. I assumed that after two or three weeks, it would be plausible for my lighter to run out of fuel at the shuttle-stop. Five weeks later though, it was still going, and on that ninth Monday, I saw how stupid I was being, how stupid your father had made me: The lighter did not need to actually run out of fuel. It only needed to
seem
as if the lighter had run out of fuel. Plausibility was not an issue. In a million years, your father would not suspect that I would go to all the lengths I had gone to in order to get him to come across the street.

If my lighter seemed to run out of fuel, he would assume that it was a dud or an old lighter. And that is why, when he finally did come across the street, I lit my cigarette with my lighter—not to make him feel like a fool who had fallen for a trick, but rather because he had said, ‘You had better luck with matches,’ when in fact I had not. It was not matches that brought him across the street. It was matches that kept him on the bench.”

“I am Tamar,” she’d said to him, extending her hand. But by that point, even if he did hear her say it, it didn’t matter. No matter how strongly he’d been determined to defy Shneerson’s advice, and no matter how well he might have been able to harness that determination if he had heard her name the moment he first saw her, 229

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eight weeks of longing is too much longing to defy for the sake of defiance. It is a great blessing my parents fell in love at a distance.

Swallowing the last of his bagel, my dad sat on a stone bench for the relatives of seven dead people called Farber. “This may be the wrong cemetary,” he said. “Why don’t we take a little break.” He slapped the bench, and I sat. Wind moved clouds and the moon was suddenly huge. Silverflake in the marble of Shua (Beloved Son, 1963–1995) Farber’s gravemarker twinkled, and so did the tips of taller grassblades the gravekeeper’s mower had failed to chop.

“Spooked?” my dad said.

The moon doesn’t spook me, I said.

“You got quiet,” he said.

He was the one who got quiet, though.

The wind stopped.

I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t my turn yet.

My dad scraped a safety match against his side of the bench and had a cigarette lit before the sulfer finished crackling. He let the match burn for a few seconds, then flicked his wrist once to snuff the flame. When the tip quit glowing, he set the dead match between us. I picked it up and drew a line on my left palm with the black end. Then I clasped my hands and a line appeared on the right palm as well. I re-clasped with my thumbs switched and each of my palms had a slanty X in the center. Before I entered kindergarten, I used to go to the library with my mom some mornings, and she taught me the X-palm action so I wouldn’t get bored when I waited outside with her while she smoked. It took me almost a whole year to master. If you don’t make the first line thick enough, 230

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then the second line won’t be dark enough to cross the first line on the re-clasp; but if you press too hard when you draw the first line, the matchtip crumbles all at once, and you end up with no lines, let alone two X’s. My dad couldn’t perform the X-palm action. That is what he said. I never saw him try, though, and while I watched him smoke, I thought: Maybe he only pretends he can’t.

He pointed the cherry of his cigarette at my uneaten bagel, said,

“Nu?”

You want me to give it to you? I said.

“Are you going to eat it?”

It’s chometz, I said.

“For you, maybe.”

And for you, I said.

“And so you won’t give it to me?”

I said, Do I have to?

“You don’t
have
to.”

I said, I’m not going to give it to you unless I have to.

“It would be a shame to waste a fresh bagel,” he said.

It would be a shame to eat chometz on Passover, I said. When you say it would be a shame to waste a bagel, but that I don’t have to do anything, but that you would like me to give you chometz

to eat on Passover and I am trying to honor you because you’re my father, but that the way to honor you might be to help you break the law on Passover, it is impossible for me to figure out the right thing to do, and that is also a shame.

And that is when my dad started laughing at me. It was the same edgy laugh he’d laughed at the table, and I saw that Yuval wasn’t what made him laugh it—Yuval wasn’t there anymore—but 231

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the four cups of wine. Whereas the sacrament had made Yuval jovi-ally wobble, it had made my dad sad, wounded-animal sad. I didn’t like him that way. He was weaker that way. He was wrong that way.

He was not supposed to be wrong or get weaker, so I tried to correct him. I told him what I thought to be true.

I said, I think you killed both of those men.

He stopped laughing.

I said, I think that is good.

“You think it’s
good?
” he said.

I said, It’s what I would have done, if I could have.

My father said, “The second man had no gun, Gurion. There were three of us and one of him.”

You did what you had to do to stop him, I said.

“And if I told you he caught fire only after he’d been laid out on the pavement by Rolly and Yuval?”

I said, If you set him on fire while he was near the girl, she would have caught on fire. It was smart of you to wait.

“And if I told you that I only spoke the sephirot
once, when the first man held his gun on us?”

Why do you keep saying “if I told you,” Aba
?
Why are you talking like a lawyer to your son? You’re telling me what
happened
, this isn’t hypothetical, and I will not be confused by your ‘if I told you’s, and Ema won’t be able to confuse me later either. Two men were raping a girl and you killed them by speaking the sephirot once. That is what you’re telling me. Good. It is good. I’m telling you it’s good. And I’m telling you it’s even more miraculous than if you’d spoken the sephirot twice, because it means that you didn’t just make fire with words, and you didn’t just do it to two 232

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men with a single utterance, but the fire you made was a strategic kind of fire that waited to burn the second man until he was away from the girl.

“By the time the second man caught fire,” said my father, “he was subdued and defenseless. That is not
strategic.
There was no reason for him to die.”

He’d been raping that girl, I said.

“Who said it was rape?” my father said.

I said, Please stop lawyering me! This is the Talmud, Aba. Be earnest here.

He laughed the edgy laugh. “So how did you know then? I’m asking you.”

I said, Sara called it ‘struggling.’ She called it that because Yuval called it that when he told her the story. He would’ve called it

‘mugging’ if it was mugging and ‘murdering’ if it was murdering and ‘beating’ if it was beating, but he called it ‘struggling’ because he didn’t want to say ‘rape’ to his daughter. They were raping that girl, I said, and that makes them rapists. I said, They had to die.

“They raped, and so I should murder?”

It wasn’t murder, I said. It was killing.

“Enough with the eye for an eye business, Gurion. Even if that
were
a just system, rape does not end life, and so the life-taking was unjust, and so the life-taking was a murder.” In Hebrew, he said,

“Why are you walking away from me?”

Over my shoulder, I answered him in Hebrew, and it was Hebrew we spoke for the rest of the conversation. I said, Am I the simple son? Why do you talk to me like I’m simple, like I need protection from truth?

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“You’re eight years old,” he said. “You need protection from a lot.”

I can face down anything.

“It’s not about what you’re faced with,” said my father. “Believe it or not, even those without soldiers for mothers can be safe from that which attacks from the front: they can run, you see, or hide.

The attacks you need protection from don’t come from the front.

They creep up behind you.”

You mean like the story of how you killed those two men? I said. I said,
That
one seems to have creeped up in
front
of me.
That
one seems to have been hiding behind another story, which was hiding behind a third story, which was hiding behind a blind spot pretending to be no story at all.

“And now that the story is before you, you misunderstand it.

You try to make it simple. You never should have heard it.”

You did not commit murder, I said. I said, You killed men who were better killed.

“They should have been jailed.”

No, I said. They should have been raped by angels, but angels don’t rape. And you couldn’t rape them because that would defile you and displease Hashem. Plus it’s gross. And to imprison a man is torture, and torture defiles the torturer as rape does the rapist. It would displease Hashem.

“You’re telling me murder pleases Him?”

I said, I’m talking about killing, not murder, please stop saying ‘murder,’ and no, I do not believe that killing ever pleases Him, but killing is necessary, and so killing fails to
displease
Him. At the very least, it does not displease Him as much as the rape or torture 234

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of a rapist would, and surely it displeases him less than a rapist who goes unpunished.

“That is not justice. To take someone’s life because you don’t know what else to do with him is not just, is not killing, is murder,”

my father said. “Every tyrant throughout history has claimed—”

Don’t start with the reasoning of tyrants, please. Your tyrants are straw-men and I’m not a jury and I’m not a tyrant. A tyrant wants peace. He takes lives to make peace, for in peace he’s secure, and free to grow stronger without interference, free to take lives—

to take lives
by murder
—without interference. So whatever brings peace, the tyrant calls justice. That doesn’t make it so. Justice is not for tyrants to define.