The Instructions (63 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

said I wouldn’t perform… It is only after I’ve requested, in a spirit of good will, that you sing me a song… Only now do you reveal that you
were
avoiding me. All a
long
avoiding me. Snubbing me. I
request
of you
a little entertainment, and you respond as you would to a petty extortionist. A common bully. I
request
and you hear a
demand
. Behind the demand you hear a
threat
. Such is the nature of demands. I ask you for a song and you offer up your dignity instead.

You treat me like a common bully.’

“So, and this is the part where he stops the speech for a second,”

Eliyahu said. “He stops the speech and cracks a handful of knuckles against the side of his own neck. He’s not facing me, Gurion, so he can’t see me, but he says to me, ‘Fear is contempt, whether the fearful know it or don’t. Look on me with fear, Eliyahu, and it will be the last open glance you cast.’”

What did you do? I said.

“
Do
?” said Eliyahu. “I looked out the window, telling myself Aleph did nothing for me earlier that day. That when the Co-Captain knocked my hat off, Aleph only watched. That the obligation I felt to step in between Nakamook and Aleph and prevent any further humiliation from happening was misguided.

In truth, I even began to long for Aleph’s further humiliation.

As if that were justice. It was awful. At the time, though, it maybe didn’t seem so awful… Anyway. Aleph, he says to Benji,

‘I didn’t mean to treat you like a bully.’ And Nakamook, he says,

‘You didn’t
mean to
treat me like a bully? Meaning you couldn’t help it? You couldn’t help but treat me like a bully? Is that sup-582

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posed to
lessen
the insult?… I asked for entertainment, and you could have refused and held your head up. I never asked for your dignity. That is what bullies do. I am not a bully. A bully has no dignity. You treat me like I have no dignity. How can I possibly lower my legs for you now? How the eff do you expect me to lower my legs and hold onto my dignity? Why have you done this to us? Answer me.’

“So Aleph apologizes. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing,’ he says.

And when that apology fails to soften Nakamook, Aleph tries a second one: ‘I didn’t mean to do what I was doing.’ Nothing. He tries a third: ‘I thought I was doing something else.’

“‘Put your dollar away,’ Nakamook tells him, ‘and pray you never again mistake dignity for a toll, nor safety for peace, let alone justice.’ High-minded stuff, right? Or crazy stuff. Carried-away stuff, maybe. Who can really tell? Not Aleph—not him.

Aleph, he’s frozen. What’s Nakamook saying? He forgive him or what? It isn’t so clear. Benji’s made it sound like he’s forgiven Aleph, but his legs, Gurion, are still stretched across the aisle, and Aleph doesn’t understand, and neither do I. The silence: it grows. It grows and grows more, Aleph just standing there, and Nakamook’s legs.

“Finally, Nakamook, he says to Aleph: ‘I told you to put your dollar in your pocket. Put your filthy effing dollar in your filthy effing pocket with your filthy trembling effing hand.’ Aleph swallows hard. Does it. Puts the dollar in his pocket. Benji’s legs haven’t moved. They’re still across the aisle. He says, ‘Now 583

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get past me. Do so with the understanding that I will be unable to bear any further insult. Understand that I will be unable to bear the insult of contact. Get past without touching me, or to preserve my own dignity, I will show you your blood, and I will be just.’

Here, Eliyahu took a fast breath, then blew out slow.

“Am I to trust a boy who would get this carried away, Gurion?”

I said, But what happened?

“It was shameful what happened!” Eliyahu said. “Aleph, first he removes his scarf and folds it and tucks it inside of his coat.

Then he reaches over Nakamook’s legs and drops his backpack onto the floor of the bus. And then he makes the decision—and, look, it’s the only decision he can possibly make, for Nakamook’s legs are bent at the knees and so too high to jump, and Aleph, he’s too tall to get under them in a crouch—he makes the decision to crawl under Nakamook’s legs. He crawls along the floor on his belly. Am I to trust a boy who would act so crazy as to make another crawl on his belly? Gurion?”

That wasn’t the only decision he could have made, I said. I said, He could have fought.

“He would have lost,” Eliyahu said.

I said, He would have lost, but it would not have been shameful.

“It might not have been
as
shameful,” said Eliyahu, “but it would have been at least a little bit shameful,
and
he would be damaged.”

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I said, I’m sure Benji had his reasons for doing what he did.

What was Aleph’s real name?

“If I knew, I wouldn’t call him Aleph.”

I said, He must have done something wrong to Benji.

“When?” said Eliyahu. “In daycare? Benji himself said they hadn’t spoken in all the years they’d gone to school together…

Say he
had
wronged Benji in daycare—it was a long time ago.

Why not let it go?”

I said, Maybe Aleph
did
wrong him in daycare, and Benji was unable to do anything about it at the time. The million different answers to ‘Why not let it go?’ have just as many good ones among them as the million you can get from ‘Why
should
I let it go?’ And look, Eliyahu, I know this place is weird, and the people in it—this school is not a member of the Associated Talmud Torahs Network. But you should trust Benji, and the reason you should trust Benji is that he is loyal to everyone who has ever shown him loyalty. He can’t help it. He is loyal to me, and so he’s loyal to you, so he wouldn’t mislead you about something like whether or not I’m in the Office for ISS.

“But he
did
mislead me, Gurion. You weren’t here before.”

He told you I was here because he knew I had ISS today, I said.

I said, He told you what he thought was true, and not because he was crazy or carried away, but because it
should
have been true, what he told you. I said, There was no reason for him to believe it wasn’t true.

“He threatened me,” said Eliyahu. “He told me to stop look-585

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ing at him in fear, or else—”

That was not a threat, I said. It was a warning.

“I hear this phrase in gangster movies,” said Eliyahu, “cowboy movies, television reruns about oil barons and men who own vineyards—I have never understood its meaning.”

I said, A boy makes a threat when he wants to damage you.

The threat itself is a minor form of damage—it makes your snat trickle. When a boy gives you a warning, though, it’s because he doesn’t want to damage you.

“What is snat?” said Eliyahu. “It sounds like something sticky and unpleasant.”

Brodsky’s door opened.

I said, I’ll give you something I wrote about it.

“Eliyahu,” said Brodsky, “you cannot talk to students who are in ISS.”

Eliyahu didn’t even look at Brodsky, though. He started speaking Hebrew to my mother. “You are Gurion’s mother,” he said, “I can tell.”

This is Eliyahu, I said to my mom.

She touched his cheek with the bottom of her hand and said,

“Eliyahu? I am glad to meet you, Eliyahu.”

“Thank you,” he said. Then he looked at his feet. Then he went to lunch.

My mother bent as if to kiss me, and she whispered in my ear,

“Eliyahu is an orphan. You—”

How do you know that? I whispered back.

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Into my other ear she whispered, “Do not be thick. I know the face of an orphan when I see one. Protect him. He loves you. So do I. Now act like I have told you that we must have a long talk when you come home from school.” Then she stood up straight.

A long talk about what? I said.

She made her voice weary and said, “We will discuss it at home, Gurion,” and, with her back still to Brodsky, she winked.

I thought: My mother is not carried away or crazy, but some third thing—she is something else.

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It’s true that Philip Roth wasn’t good for the Jews, but it bothered me that other Jews ever said so. It bothered me not only because he was as good for the Jews as any Jew of his generation could have hoped to have been, but because
they—
Roth’s accusers—were also bad for the Jews, and for the most part worse than Roth, who was always trying to protect them from themselves, which is what they believed themselves to be doing by accusing Roth of being bad for the Jews. I knew it wasn’t really their fault, though—not most of them, anyway—nor his for that matter: Jews couldn’t help trying to protect themselves from themselves any moreso than they could have helped being bad for the Jews.

That is a lot of what made them Jews. And that is why it wasn’t good to be Jews. And that is why I’ve been good for the Jews: because I’ve been the end of the Jews (except, of course, for the fic-587

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tional Jews: Zuckerman and Glick, Stern and Kravitz and Golk, Shylock, Gimpel, Tevye, and Flesh, each Paley-made granny and sister and aunt, Kosinski’s boy and all his Ruthenians—Jews forever the lot, and baruch Hashem: fiction needs Jews). All Israelites know this now. Even Philip Roth. Especially him.

But he didn’t used to. Not when he wrote
My Life as a Man
; not til after the so-called “11/17 Miracle.” In that he was no different than most of the rest of you.

I, on the other hand, had known all my life—or at least since age three, when I’d first read Torah—that I was never a Jew, but always an Israelite, and that all of us were. Therefore I knew, whether there in the Office on 11/15 or anywhere else on any day prior, that I could not have been so very much like Roth, no matter what my mother might have thought; no matter what she might have thought that
I
thought.

My mom thought I thought I was like Philip Roth, and because she thought I thought myself like Philip Roth, she assumed I’d be willing to take a lesson from Roth. That’s why she gave me
My
Life as a Man
.

(Briefly, for scholars unfamiliar with the book:
My Life as a
Man
contains three distinct parts. The first two are short stories about a fictional Jewish writer called Zuckerman* who marries a crazy, lying shiksa who ruins his life and then kills herself. The Zuckerman stories are written by another fictional Jewish writer

* Despite their having the same name, the fictional Jewish writer Zuckerman of
My Life as a Man
is not the same Zuckerman as the fictional Jewish writer Zuckerman of Roth’s “Zuckerman Novels”

(e.g.
The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral, The Human Stain
)
.

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called Tarnopol, and the third part of the book is the novel-length autobiography of Tarnopol, who marries a crazy, lying shiksa.

After ruining his life, she kills herself.)

The lesson I was supposed to take was this: I shouldn’t marry a shiksa.

But that wasn’t the lesson of the book at all—there was no lesson; books with lessons are not good books;
My Life as a Man
was a good book (a
great
book)—nor was June a shiksa, let alone a crazy, lying shiksa; and Tarnopol marries the crazy, lying shiksa in the book not because he loves her as I loved June, but because she lies to him about being pregnant.

To be clear, scholars, my mother was as lucid and concise a thinker as just about anyone I’d ever heard of. Among radical behaviorists, her renown as an innovator was spreading before she’d even finished grad school. Whenever she started to think about her son, though, her thoughts, like so many moms’, got seriously disorganized.

Thus, while she knew Roth’s book contained no lesson concerning shiksas (she
had to
have known; she was too smart not to), she wished it did, and she gave it to me thinking something along the lines of, “Gurion will see the lesson that I
wish
Roth was teaching him, and Gurion will come away from that wished-for lesson no longer wanting to marry June.” And that didn’t make sense. It wouldn’t have even made sense if
My Life as a Man
did
contain her wished-for lesson. = While she took me seriously enough to believe that I loved and would marry June because 589

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I’d said so, she not only didn’t believe it when I’d said June was Israelite, but she believed that a book by Philip Roth would have the power to fall me out of love with June. How could you believe your son was in love with a girl and at the same time believe a novel could make him stop loving her? Muddledly is how, and only muddledly.

This isn’t to say that the great degree to which her thoughts were muddled was
solely
an outcome of my love declaration. There was also my father—he enhanced the muddle, muddled it further. Had my dad reacted the same way as my mom when I told them about June at the night before’s dinner, I doubt she’d have thought to give me the book. Instead, he got all calm and laissez-faire. This wasn’t because he took my declaration more seriously than my mom had, though—at least not necessarily. His thinking most likely went something like this: “Gurion is just a boy and so is probably not actually in love with June, but just excited about her; if he
is
in love with June, though, really and truly in love, there is no way to stop it; so either he isn’t in love and there’s nothing to worry about, or he is in love and there’s no
use
in worrying.”