The Conversion of the Jews
Philip
Roth
You’re a real one for opening your mouth in the first place,” Itzie
said. “What do you open your mouth all the time for?”
“I didn’t bring it up, Itz, I didn’t,”
Ozzie said.
“What do you care about Jesus Christ for
anyway?”
“I didn’t bring up Jesus Christ. He did. I
didn’t even know what he was talking about. Jesus is historical, he kept
saying. Jesus is historical.” Ozzie mimicked the monumental voice of Rabbi
Binder.
“Jesus was a person that lived like you
and me,” Ozzie continued. “That’s what Binder said—”
“Yea? . . . So what! What do I give two
cents whether he lived or not. And what do you gotta open your mouth!” Itzie
Lieberman favored closed-mouthedness, especially when it came to Ozzie
Freedman’s questions. Mrs. Freedman had to see Rabbi Binder twice before about
Ozzie’s questions and this Wednesday at four-thirty would be the third time.
Itzie preferred to keep his mother in the kitchen; he settled for
behind-the-back subtleties such as gestures, faces, snarls and other less
delicate barnyard noises.
“He was a real person, Jesus, but he
wasn’t like God, and we don’t beheve he is God.” Slowly, Ozzie was explaining
Rabbi Binder’s position to Itzie, who had been absent from Hebrew School the
previous afternoon.
“The Catholics,” Itzie said helpfully,
“they believe in Jesus Christ, that he’s God.” Itzie Lieberman used “the
Catholics” in its broadest sense—to include the Protestants.
Ozzie received Itzie’s remark with a tiny
head bob, as though it were a footnote, and went on. “His mother was Mary, and
his father probably was Joseph,” Ozzie said. “But the New Testament says his
real father was God.”
“His real father?”
“Yea,” Ozzie said, “that’s the big thing,
his father’s supposed to be God.”
“Bull.”
“That’s what Rabbi Binder says, that it’s
impossible—”
“Sure it’s impossible. That stuff’s all
bull. To have a baby you gotta get laid,” Itzie theologized. “Mary hadda get
laid.”
“That’s what Binder says: “The only way a
woman can have a baby is to have intercourse with a man.”
“He said that, Ozz?” For a moment it
appeared that Itzie had put the theological question aside. “He said that, intercourse?”
A little curled smile shaped itself in the lower half of Itzie’s face like a
pink mustache. “What you guys do, Ozz, you laugh or something?”
“I raised my hand.”
“Yea? Whatja say?”
“That’s when I asked the question.”
Itzie’s face lit up like a firefly’s
behind. “Whatja ask about— intercourse?”
“No, I asked the question about God, how
if He could create the heaven and earth in six days, and make all the animals
and the fish and the light in six days—the light especially, that’s what always
gets me, that He could make the light. Making fish and animals, that’s pretty
good—”
“That’s damn good.” Itzie’s appreciation
was honest but unimaginative: it was as though God had just pitched a
one-hitter.
“But making light . . . I mean when you
think about it, it’s really something,” Ozzie said. “Anyway, I asked Binder if
He could make all that in six days, and He could pick the
six days He wanted right out of nowhere, why couldn’t He let a woman have a
baby without having intercourse.”
“You said intercourse, Ozz, to Binder?”
“Yea.”
“Right in class?”
“Yea.”
Itzie smacked the side of his head.
“I mean, no kidding around,” Ozzie said,
“that’d really be nothing. After all that other stuff, that’d practically be
nothing.”
Itzie considered a moment. “What’d Binder
say?”
“He started all over again explaining how
Jesus was historical and how he lived like you and me but he wasn’t God. So I
said I understood that. What I wanted to know was
different.”
What Ozzie wanted to know was always
different. The first time he had wanted to know how Rabbi Binder could call the
Jews “The Chosen People” if the Declaration of Independence claimed all men to
be created equal. Rabbi Binder tried to distinguish for him between political
equality and spiritual legitimacy, but what Ozzie wanted to know, he insisted
vehemently, was different. That was the first time his mother had to come.
Then there was the plane crash.
Fifty-eight people had been killed in a plane crash at La Guardia, and in
studying a casualty list in the newspaper his mother had discovered among the
list of those dead eight Jewish names (his grandmother had nine but she counted
Miller as a Jewish name); because of the eight she said the plane crash was “a
tragedy.” During free-discussion time on Wednesday Ozzie had brought to Rabbi
Binder’s attention this matter of “some of his relations” always picking out
the Jewish names. Rabbi Binder had begun to explain cultural unity and some
other things when Ozzie stood up at his seat and said that what he wanted to
know was different. Rabbi Binder insisted that he sit down and it was then that
Ozzie shouted that he wished all fifty-eight were Jews. That was the second
time his mother came.
“And he kept explaining about Jesus being
historical, and so I kept asking him. No kidding, Itz, he was trying to make me
look stupid.”
“So what he finally do?”
“Finally he starts screaming that I was
deliberately simple-minded and a wise-guy, and that my mother had to come, and
this was the last time. And that I’d never get bar-mitzvahed if he could help
it. Then, Itz, then he starts talking in that voice like a statue, real slow
and deep, and he says that I better think over what I said about the Lord. He
told me to go to his office and think it over.” Ozzie leaned his body towards
Itzie. “Itz, I thought it over for a solid hour, and now I’m convinced God
could do it.”
Ozzie bad planned to confess his latest
transgression to his mother as soon as she came home from work. But it was a
Friday night in November and already dark, and when Mrs. Freedman came through
the door, she tossed off her coat, kissed Ozzie quickly on the face, and went
to the kitchen table to light the three yellow candles, two for the Sabbath and
one for Ozzie’s father.
When his mother lit candles she would move
her arms slowly towards her, dragging them tlirough the air, as though
persuading people whose minds were half made up. And her eyes would get glassy
with tears. Even when his father was alive Ozzie remembered that her eyes had
gotten glassy, so it didn’t have anything to do with his dying. It had
something to do with lighting the candles.
As she touched the flaming match to the
unlit wick of a Sabbath candle, the phone rang, and Ozzie, standing only a foot
from it, plucked it off the receiver and held it muffled to his chest, when his
mother lit candles Ozzie felt there should be no noise; even breathing, if you
could manage it, should be softened. Ozzie pressed the phone to his breast and
watched his mother dragging whatever she was dragging, and he felt his own eyes
get glassy. His mother was a round, tired, grayhaired penguin of a woman whose
gray skin had begun to feel the tug of gravity and the weight of her own
history. Even when she was dressed up she didn’t look like a chosen person. But
when she lit candles she looked like something better; like a woman who knew
momentarily that God could do anything.
After a few mysterious minutes she was
finished. Ozzie hung up the phone and walked to the kitchen table where she was
beginning to lay the two places for the four-course Sabbath meal. He told her
that she would have to see Rabbi Binder next Wednesday at four-thirty, and then
he told her why. For the first time in their life together she hit Ozzie across
the face with her hand.
All through the chopped liver and chicken
soup part of the dinner Ozzie cried; he didn’t have any appetite for the rest.
On Wednesday in the largest of the three
basement classrooms of the synagogue, Rabbi Marvin Binder, a tall, handsome,
broad-shouldered man of thirty with thick strong-fibered black hair, removed
his watch from his pocket and saw that it was four o’clock. At the rear of the
room Yakov Blotnik, the seventy-one year old custodian, slowly polished the
large window, mumbling to himself, unaware that it was four o’clock or six o’clock,
Monday or Wednesday. To most of the students Yakov Blotnik’s mumbling, along
with his brown curly beard, scythe-nose, and two heel-trailing black cats, made
of him an object of wonder, a foreigner, a relic towards whom they were
alternately fearful and disrespectful. To Ozzie the mumbling had always seemed
a monotonous, curious prayer; what made it curious was that old Blotnik had
been mumbling so steadily for so many years Ozzie suspected he had memorized
the prayers and forgotten all about God.
“It is now free-discussion time,” Rabbi
Binder said. “Feel free to talk about any Jewish matter at all—religion,
family, politics, sports—”
There was silence. It was a gusty, clouded
November afternoon and it did not seem as though there ever was or could be a thing
called baseball. So nobody this week said a word about that hero from the past,
Hank Greenberg—which limited free-discussion considerably.
And the soul-battering Ozzie Freedman had
just received from Rabbi Binder had imposed its limitation. When it was Ozzie’s
turn to read aloud from the Hebrew book the rabbi had asked him petulantly why
he didn’t read more rapidly. He was showing no progress. Ozzie said he could
read faster but that if he did he was sure not to understand what he was
reading. Nevertheless, at the rabbi’s repeated suggestion Ozzie tried, and
showed a great talent, but in the midst of a long passage he stopped short and
said he didn’t understand a word he was reading, and started in again at a
drag-footed pace. Then came the soul-battering.
Consequently when free-discussion time
rolled around none of the students felt too free. The rabbi’s invitation was
answered only by the mumbhng of feeble old Blotnik.
“Isn’t there anything at all you would
like to discuss?” Rabbi Binder asked again, looking at his watch. “No questions
or comments?”
There was a small grumble from the third
row. The rabbi requested that Ozzie rise and give the rest of the class the
advantage of his thought.
Ozzie rose. “I forget it now,” he said and
sat down in his place.
Rabbi Binder advanced a seat towards Ozzie
and poised himself on the edge of the desk. It was Itzie’s desk and the rabbi’s
frame only a dagger’s-length away from his face snapped him to sitting
attention.
“Stand up again, Oscar,” Rabbi Binder said
calmly, “and try to assemble your thoughts.”
Ozzie stood up. All his classmates turned
in their seats and watched as he gave an unconvincing scratch to his forehead.
“I can’t assemble any,” he announced, and plunked himself down.
“Stand up!” Rabbi Binder advanced from
Itzie’s desk to the one directly in front of Ozzie; when the rabbinical back
was turned Itzie gave it five-fingers off the tip of his nose, causing a small
titter in the room. Rabbi Binder was too absorbed in squelching Ozzie’s
nonsense once and for all to bother with titters. “Stand up, Oscar. What’s your
question about?”
Ozzie pulled a word out of the air. It was
the handiest word. “Religion.”
“Oh, now you remember?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
Trapped, Ozzie blurted the first thing
that came to liim. “Why can’t He make anything He wants to make!”
As Rabbi Binder prepared an answer, a
final answer, Itzie, ten feet behind him, raised one finger on his left hand,
gestured it meaningfully towards the rabbi’s back, and brought the house down.
Binder twisted quickly to see what had
happened and in the midst of the commotion Ozzie shouted into the rabbi’s back
what he couldn’t have shouted to his face. It was a loud, toneless sound that
had the timbre of something stored inside for about six days.
“You don’t know! You don’t know anything
about God!”
The rabbi spun back towards Ozzie. “What?”
“You don’t know—you don’t—”
“Apologize, Oscar, apologize!” It was a
threat.
“You don’t—”
Like a snake’s tongue. Rabbi Binder’s hand
flicked out at Ozzie’s cheek. Perhaps it had only been meant to clamp the boy’s
mouth shut, but Ozzie ducked and the palm caught him squarely on the nose.
The blood came in a short, red spurt on to
Ozzie’s shirt front.
The next moment was all confusion. Ozzie
screamed, “You bastard, you bastard!” and broke for the classroom door.
Rabbi Binder lurched a step backwards, as
though his own blood had started flowing, violently in the opposite direction,
then gave a clumsy lurch forward and bolted out the door after Ozzie. The class
followed after the rabbi’s huge blue-suited back, and before old Blotnik could
turn from his window, the room was empty and everyone was headed full speed up
the three flights leading to the roof.
If one should compare the light of day to
the life of man: sunrise to birth; sunset—the dropping down over the edge— to
death; then as Ozzie Freedman wiggled through the trapdoor of the synagogue
roof—his feet kicking backwards bronco-style at Rabbi Binder’s outstretched
arms—at that moment the day was fifty years old. As a rule, fifty or fifty-five
reflects accurately the age of late afternoons in November, for it is in that
month, during those hours, that one’s awareness of light seems no longer a
matter of seeing, but of hearing: light begins clicking away, in fact, as Ozzie
locked shut the trapdoor in the rabbi’s face, the sharp click of the bolt into
the lock might momentarily have been mistaken for the sound of the vast gray
light that had just throbbed through the sky.
With all his weight Ozzie kneeled on the
locked door; any instant he was certain that Rabbi Binder’s shoulder would
fling it open, splintering the wood into shrapnel and catapulting his body into
the sky. But the door did not move and below him he heard only the rumble of
feet, first loud then dim, like thunder rolling away.
A question shot through his brain. “Can
this be me?” For a thirteen year old
who had just labeled his religious leader a bastard, twice, it was not an
improper question. Louder and louder the question came to him—”Is it me? It is
me?”—until he discovered himself no longer kneeling, but racing crazily towards
the edge of the roof, his eyes crying, his throat screaming, and his arms
flying every which way as though not his own.
“Is it me? Is it me Me ME ME ME! It has to
be me—but is it!”
It is the question a thief must ask
himself the night he jimmies open his first window, and it is said to be the
question with which bridegrooms quiz themselves before the altar.
In the few wild seconds it took Ozzie’s
body to propel him to the edge of the roof, his self-examination began to grow
fuzzy. Gazing down at the street, he became confused as to the problem beneath
the question: was it, is-it-me-who-called- Binder-a-Bastard? or,
is-it-me-prancing-around-on-the-roof? However, the scene below settled all, for
there is an instant in any action when whether it is you or somebody else is
academic. The thief crams the money in his pockets and scoots out the window.
The bridegroom signs the hotel register for two. And the boy on the roof finds
a streetful of people gaping at him, necks stretched backwards, faces up, as
though he were the ceiling of the Hayden Planetarium. Suddenly you know it’s
you.
“Oscar! Oscar Freedman!” A voice rose from
the center of the crowd, a voice that, could it have been seen, would have looked
like the writing on scroll. “Oscar Freedman, get down from there. Immediately!”
Rabbi Binder was pointing one arm stiffly up at him; and at the end of that
arm, one finger aimed menacingly. It was the attitude of a dictator, but
one—the eyes confessed all—whose personal valet had spit neatly in his face.
Ozzie didn’t answer. Only for a blink’s
length did he look towards Rabbi Binder. Instead his eyes began to fit together
the world beneath him, to sort out people from places, friends from enemies, participants
from spectators. In little jagged star-like clusters his friends stood around
Rabbi Binder, who was still pointing. The topmost point on a star compounded
not of angels but of five adolescent boys was Itzie. What a world it was, with
those stars below, Rabbi Binder below . . . Ozzie, who a moment earlier hadn’t
been able to control his own body, started to feel the meaning of the word
control: he felt Peace and he felt Power.
“Oscar Freedman, I’ll give you three to
come down.”
Few dictators give their subjects three to
do anything; but, as always, Rabbi Binder only looked dictatorial.
“Are you ready, Oscar?”
Ozzie nodded his head yes, although he had
no intention in the world—the lower one or the celestial one he’d just entered—
of coming down even if Rabbi Binder should give him a million.
“All right then,” said Rabbi Binder. He
ran a hand through his black Samson hair as though it were the gesture
prescribed for uttering the first digit. Then, with his other hand, cutting a
circle out of the small piece of sky around him, he spoke. “One!”
There was no thunder. On the contrary, at
that moment, as though “one” was the cue for which he had been waiting, the
world’s least thunderous person appeared on the synagogue steps. He did not so
much come out the synagogue door as lean out, onto the darkening air. He
clutched at the doorknob with one hand and looked up at the roof.
“Oy!”
Yakov Blotnik’s old mind hobbled slowly,
as if on crutches, and though he couldn’t decide precisely what the boy was
doing on the roof, he knew it wasn’t good—that is, it wasn’t good-for-the-Jews.
For Yakov Blotnik life had fractionated itself simply: things were either
good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews.
He smacked his free hand to his in-sucked
cheek, gently. “Oy, Gut!” And then quickly as he could he jacked down his head
and surveyed the street. There was Rabbi Binder (like a man at an auction with
only three dollars in his pocket, he had just delivered a shaky “Two!”); there
were the students, and that was all. So far it-wasn’t-so-bad-for-the-Jews. But
the boy had to come down immediately, before anybody saw. The problem: how to
get the boy off the roof?
Anybody who has ever had a cat on the roof
knows how to get him down. You call the fire department. Or first you call the
operator and you ask her for the fire department. And the next thing there is a
great jamming of brakes and clanging of bells and shouting of instructions. And
then the cat is off the roof. You do the same thing to get a boy off the roof.
That is, you do the same thing if you are Yakov Blotnik and you once had a cat.
It took a short while for the engines, all
four of them, to arrive. As it turned out Rabbi Binder had four times given
Ozzie the count of three; had he not decided to stop, by the time the engines
roared up he would have given him three one hundred and seven times.
The big hook-and-ladder was still swinging
around the corner when one of the firemen leaped from it, plunged headlong
towards the yellow fire hydrant in front of the synagogue, and with a huge
wrench began unscrewing the top nozzle. Rabbi Binder raced over to him and
pulled at his shoulder.
“There’s no fire . . .”
The fireman mumbled something sounding
like “Screw, buddy,” back over his shoulder to him and, heatedly, continued
working at the nozzle.
“But there’s no fire, there’s no fire . .
.” Binder shouted. When the fireman mumbled again, the rabbi grasped his face
with both his hands and pointed it up at the roof.
To Ozzie it looked as though Rabbi Binder
was trying to tug the fireman’s head out of his body, like a cork from a
bottle. He had to giggle at the picture they made: it was a family
portrait—rabbi in black skullcap, fireman in red firehat, and the little yellow
hydrant squatting beside like a kid brother, bareheaded. From the edge of the
roof Ozzie waved at the portrait, a one-handed, flapping, mocking wave; in
doing it his right foot slipped from under him. Rabbi Binder covered his eyes
with his hands.
Firemen work fast. Before Ozzie had even
regained his balance, a big, round, yellowed net was being held on the
synagogue lawn. The firemen who held it looked up at Ozzie with stern,
feelingless faces.
One of the firemen turned his head towards
Rabbi Binder. “What, is the kid nuts or something?”
Rabbi Binder unpeeled his hands from his
eyes, slowly, painfully, as if they were tape. Then he checked: nothing on the
sidewalk, no dents in the net.
“Is he gonna jump, or what?” the fireman
shouted.
In a voice not at all like a statue. Rabbi
Binder finally answered, “Yes, yes, I think so . . . He’s been threatening to .
. .”
Threatening to? Why, the reason he was on
the roof, Ozzie remembered, was to get away; he hadn’t even thought about
jumping. He had just run to get away, and the truth was that he hadn’t really
headed for the roof as much as he’d been chased there.
“What’s his name, the kid?”
“Freedman,” Rabbi Binder answered. “Oscar
Freedman.”
The fireman looked up at Ozzie. “What is
it with you, Oscar? You gonna jump, or what?”
Ozzie did not answer. Frankly, the
question had just arisen.
“Look, Oscar, if you’re gonna jump,
jump—and if you’re not gonna jump, don’t jump. But don’t waste our time,
willya?”
Ozzie looked at the fireman and then at
Rabbi Binder. He wanted to see Rabbi Binder cover his eyes one more time.
“I’m going to jump.”
And then he scampered around the edge of
the roof to the corner, where there was no net below, and he flapped his arms
at his sides, swishing the air and smacking his palms to his trousers on the
downbeat; he began screaming like some kind of engine, “Wheeeee . . .
wheeeeee,” and leaning way out over the edge with the upper half of his body.
The firemen whipped around to cover the ground with the net. Rabbi Binder
mumbled a few words to Somebody and covered his eyes. Everything happened
quickly, jerkily, as in a silent movie. The crowd, which had arrived with the
fire-engines, gave out a long, Fourth-of-July fireworks, oooh-aahhh. In the
excitement no one had paid the crowd much heed, except, of course, Yakov
Blotnik, who swung from the doorknob counting heads. “Fier und tsvansik . . .
finf und tsvantsik . . . Oy, Gut!” It wasn’t like this with the cat.
Rabbi Binder peeked through his fingers,
checked the sidewalk and net. Empty. But there was Ozzie racing to the other
corner of the roof. The firemen raced with him but were unable to keep up.
Whenever Ozzie wanted to he might jump and splatter himself upon the sidewalk,
and by the time the firemen scooted to the spot all they could do with their
net would be to cover the mess.
“Wheeeee . . . wheeeee . . .”
“Hey, Oscar,” the winded fireman yelled,
“what the hell is this, a game or something?”
“Wheeeee . . . wheeeee...”
“Hey, Oscar—”
But he was off now to the other corner,
flapping his wings fiercely. Rabbi Binder couldn’t take it any longer—the fire
engines from nowhere, the screaming suicidal boy, the net.
He fell to his knees exhausted, and with
his hands curled together in front of his chest like a little dome, he pleaded,
“Oscar, stop it, Oscar. Don’t jump, Oscar. Please come down . . . Please don’t
jump.”
And further back in the crowd a single
voice, a single young voice, shouted a long word to the boy on the roof.
“Jump!”
It was Itzie. Ozzie momentarily stopped
flapping.
“Go ahead, Ozz—jump!” Itzie broke off his
point of the star and courageously, with the inspiration not of a wise-guy but
of a disciple, stood alone, “Jump, Ozz, jump!”
Still on his knees, his hands still
curled. Rabbi Binder twisted his body back. He looked at Itzie, then,
agonizingly, back up to Ozzie.
“Oscar, DON’T JUMP! PLEASE, DON’T JUMP . .
. please please . . .”
“Jump!” This time it wasn’t Itzie but
another point of the star. By the time Mrs. Freedman arrived to keep her
four-thirty appointment with Rabbi Binder, the whole little upside down heaven
was shouting and pleading for Ozzie to jump, and Rabbi Binder no longer was
pleading with him not to jump, but was crying into the dome of his hands.
Understandably Mrs. Freedman couldn’t
figure out what her son was doing on the roof. So she asked.
“Ozzie, my Ozzie, what are you doing? My
Ozzie, what is it?”
Ozzie stopped wheeeeeing and slowed his
arms down to a cruising flap, the kind birds use in soft winds, but he did not
answer. He stood against the low, clouded, darkening sky—light was clicking
down more swiftly now, as on a small gear—flapping softly and gazing down at
the small bundle of a woman who was his mother.
“What are you doing, Ozzie?” She turned
toward the kneeling Rabbi Binder and rushed so close that only a
paper-thickness of dusk lay between her stomach and his shoulders.
“What is my baby doing?”
Rabbi Binder gaped up at her but he too
was mute. All that moved was the dome of his hands; it shook back and forth
like a weak pulse.
“Rabbi, get him down! He’ll kill himself.
Get him down, my only baby . . .”
“I can’t,” Rabbi Binder said, “I can’t . .
.” and he turned his handsome head toward the crowd of boys behind him.
“It’s them. Listen to them.”
And for the first time Mrs. Freedman saw
the crowd of boys and she heard what they were yelling.
“He’s doing it for them. He won’t listen
to me. It’s them.” Rabbi Binder spoke like one in a trance.
“For them?”
“Yes.”
“Why for them?”
“They want him to . . .”
Mrs. Freedman raised her two arms upward
as though she were conducting the sky. “For them he’s doing it!” And then in a
gesture older than pyramids, older than prophets and floods, her arms came
slapping down to her sides. “A martyr I have. Look!” She tilted her head to the
roof. Ozzie was still flapping softly. “My martyr.”
“Oscar, come down, please,”
Rabbi Binder groaned.
In a startlingly even voice Mrs. Freedman
called to the boy on the roof. “Ozzie, come down, Ozzie. Don’t be a martyr, my
baby.”
Like a litany, Rabbi Binder repeated her
words. “Don’t be a martyr, my baby. Don’t be a martyr.”
“Gawhead, Ozz—be a Martin!” It was Itzie.
“Be a Martin, be a Martin,” and all the voices joined in singing for Martindom.
“Be a Martin, be a Martin . . .”
Somehow when you’re on a roof the darker
it gets the less you can hear. All Ozzie knew was that two groups wanted two
new things: his friends were spirited and musical about what they wanted; his
mother and the rabbi were even-toned, chanting, about what they didn’t want.
The rabbi’s voice was without tears now and so was his mother’s.
The big net stared up at Ozzie like a
sightless eye. The big, clouded sky pushed down. From beneath it looked like a
gray corrugated board. Suddenly, looking up into that unsympathetic sky, Ozzie
realized all the strangeness of what these people, his friends, were asking:
they wanted him to jump, to kill himself; they were singing about it now—it
made them that happy. And there was an even greater strangeness: Rabbi Binder
was on his knees, trembling. If there was a question to be asked now it was
not, “Is it me?” but rather, “Is it us? . . . is it us?”
Being on the roof, it tumed out, was a
serious thing. If he jumped would the singing become dancing? Would it? What
would jumping stop? Yearningly, Ozzie wished he could rip open the sky, plunge
his hands through, and pull out the sun; and on the sun, like a coin, would be
stamped JUMP or DONT JUMP.
Ozzie’s knees rocked and sagged a little
under him as though they were setting him for a dive. His arms tightened,
stiffened, froze, from shoulders to fingernails. He felt as if each part of his
body were going to vote as to whether he should kill himself or not—and each
part as though it were independent of him.
The light took a long, loud, unexpected
click down and the new darkness quickly, like a gag, hushed the friends singing
for this and the mother and rabbi chanting for that.
Ozzie stopped counting votes, and in a
curiously high voice, like one who wasn’t prepared for speech, he spoke.
“Mamma?”
“Yes, Oscar.”
“Mamma, get down on your knees, like Rabbi
Binder.”
“Oscar—”
“Get down on your knees,” he said, “or
I’ll jump.”
Ozzie heard a whimper, then a quick
rustling, and when he looked down where his mother had stood he saw the top of
a head and beneath that a circle of dress. She was kneeling beside Rabbi
Binder.
He spoke again. “Everybody kneel.” There
was the sound of everybody kneeling.
Ozzie looked around. With one hand he
pointed toward the synagogue entrance. “Makehim kneel.”
There was a noise, not of kneeling, but of
body-and-cloth stretching. Ozzie could hear Rabbi Binder saying in a gruff
whisper, “. . . or he’ll kill himself,” and when next he
looked there was Yakov Blotnik off the doorknob and for the first time in his
life upon his knees in the Gentile posture of prayer.
As for the firemen—it is not as difficult
as one might imagine to hold a net taut while you are kneeling.
Ozzie looked around again; and then, still
in the voice high as a young girl’s, he called to Rabbi Binder.
“Rabbi?”
“Yes, Oscar.”
“Rabbi Binder, do you believe in God?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe God can do Anything?”
Ozzie leaned his head out into the darkness. “Anything?”
“Oscar, I think—”
“Tell me you believe God can do Anything.”
There was a second’s hesitation. Then;
“God can do Anything.”
“Tell me you believe God can make a child
without intercourse.”
“He can.”
“Tell me!”
“God,” Rabbi Binder admitted, “can make a
child without intercourse.”
“Mamma, you tell me.”
“God can make a child without
intercourse,” his mother said.
“Make him tell me.” There was no doubt who him was.
In a few moments Ozzie heard on old
comical voice say something to the increasing darkness about God.
Next, Ozzie made everybody say it. And
then he made them all say they believed in Jesus Christ—first one at a time,
then all together.
When the catechizing was through it was
the beginning of evening. From the street it sounded as if someone on the roof
might have sighed.
“Ozzie?” A woman’s voice dared to speak. “You’ll come down now?”
There was no answer, but the woman waited,
and when a voice finally did speak it was thin and crying, and exhausted as
that of an old man who has just finished pulling the bells.
“Mamma, don’t you see—you shouldn’t hit
me. He shouldn’t hit me. You shouldn’t hit me about God, Mamma. You should
never hit anybody about God—”
“Ozzie, please come down now.”
“Promise me. Mamma, promise me you’ll never
hit anybody about God.”
He had asked only his mother, but for some
reason everyone kneeling in the street promised he would never hit anybody
about God.
Once again there was silence.
“I can come down now, Mamma,” the boy on
the roof finally said. He turned his head both ways as though checking the
traffic lights. “Now I can come down . . .”
And he did, right into the center of the
yellow net that glowed in the evening’s edge like an overgrown halo.
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