“Sheket!” Mrs. A–Z yells. “SHEKET, YELADIM!!!” Quiet, children!
“It was Jerry! It was Jerry!” everyone tattles at once.
“Jerry, shtok et-hapeh!” Shut your mouth!
And everyone is laughing, even me, because that’s Jerry for you.
Agoof is Jerry Himmelstein’s rallying cry and identity statement; it is half spoken and half sneezed, and it means: (1) I think this is funny; (2) I’m confused; (3) I don’t know where I am; (4) I want to be one of you; (5) please stop hitting me; (6) I don’t know how to express this yet because I am eight years old, and my family is troubled, and the world in the way it is presently configured does not treat me as a human, does not afford me all the freedoms promised in the Declaration of Independence that hangs on the wall of class 2C, and I do not understand why it has to be that way.
Does agoof also mean “I have goofed”? Is it apologetic in nature? I will never know.
Jerry Himmelstein has both shirttails hanging out of the front of his pants like little dicks, while I normally only have one. “Jerry!” Mrs. A–Z will say, pointing at his shirttails. “Agoof!” Jerry Himmelstein’s shoes are untied like mine, but sometimes when he’s nervously swinging his little Jerry legs up and down in class, a shoe will fly up in the air and it will hit someone in the head who, if it’s a boy, will hit Jerry in the stomach by return mail. “Agoof!” Jerry’s brown hair descends down his head as if an Italian had emptied a kettle of his favorite food upon it, and his teeth are as yellow as egg yolks. His face darts back and forth looking for potential enemies. A web of spittle will attach to his face when he’s in full breakdown agoof mode. This will usually happen at a birthday party, let’s say his own. An SSSQ girl will tell him, in one way or another, that he’s not a person. Agoof! Then a boy will knock him down into the dirt or smush him with the leftovers of a magical Carvel Cookie Puss cake onto his pasta head. Agoof! Then it’s time to be picked for Wiffle ball, and I’ll be picked second to last and he will be picked last. Agoof! Then instead of hitting the Wiffle ball with the Wiffle bat he will clock himself with it, and then he’ll be lying down on the “plate” clutching at his own chin. Agooooooof! Then another girl, in OshKosh overalls or, later, in a Benetton sweater, will come over and, instead of administering help, inform him once more that he is not a person. And now all these agoofs have added up, as they must, and he sits there, hand to his jaw, hand to his stomach, hand to his face, hand to whatever part has been offended, and he’s wailing like something out of the Torah, like something before Abraham even, like when the earth was exploding into place in Genesis. Adonaaaaaaaaaai! Yaaaaaahweeeeeh! And the more he wails, the more we laugh, the girls and boys of SSSQ, because it’s pretty wonderful, his pain, pretty wonderful as far as these things go.
I take the role of Jerry Himmelstein’s second-in-command seriously. I must be humiliated and hit, too. It is understood that anyone can hit me. That’s what I’m there for, to absorb the sunlit, nascent-mustachioed hatred of the future homeowners of eastern Queens. In a school without excessive discipline, without excessive leadership, without excessive education, speed bumps must be provided so that the whole enterprise can run smoothly. The Stinky Russian Bear, the Red Gerbil, will rise to the occasion!
In the back of the school bus, my friend, another Yitzhak, is punching me in the stomach. Yitzi is only several steps up the totem above me: He’s not from Forest Hills or Ramat Aviv, in the fancy north of Tel Aviv; he’s from Soviet Georgia, and there’s only his mother to care for him, the father I don’t know where he went. I like Yitzi quite a lot, because he can hit me in my own language, and when I cry out Bol’no! (It hurts!), he’ll know what it means. He also must know about my brand-spanking-new circumcision, because he never hits below the belt. His apartment is across the street from my grandmother, who watches me after school, and we’ll go there to play a handheld electronic game called Donkey Kong after the school bus drops us off. He won’t really hit me after we’re out of sight of the other boys, so I think this is probably just a way to assert his place. In a combination of Russian and English we try to discuss ways to move ahead in the ranks of SSSQ, me the impressionable Boy Wonder to his Batman, while his mother serves us delicious Georgian-style dumplings heavy on the onion.
He’s not a bad boy, Yitzi (one day, he’ll grow up to be a wonderful man). He’s just trying to become American, trying to get ahead. To that end, he has an amazing leather jacket with zippers, not made of real Polish leather but out of something much cooler, James Dean, for all I know. Years later, in the back of a crowded minibus huffing its way onto Moscow Square in what is now St. Petersburg, I am reintroduced with major prejudice to that Yitzi smell, the combination of leather and onion and the back of a bus. I cry out, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” fighting my way out of the packed vehicle and into the broken sunlight. “But you’ve just paid,” the incredulous driver will say. “I forgot something,” I say to him. “I forgot something at home.” Which is the opposite of what I mean.
Tot kto ne byot, tot ne lyubit, my father likes to say.
He who doesn’t hit, doesn’t love.
Or is it: Byot, znachit lyubit? He hits, therefore he loves. Said “jokingly” of violent husbands in Russian marriages.
Essentially he’s got it down. If you want to make someone love you, a child, say, you should hit him well. If you’ve come home from your new engineering job at a national laboratory on Long Island, exhausted and angry, because you don’t speak the language well and the Jewish boss was gone and you had to deal with the evil German one and the stinking Chinese one, and the Portuguese and Greek engineers who are often your allies didn’t intervene in your favor, and your wife’s a suka with her fucking rodstvenniki in Leningrad, her dying mother, and her sisters to whom she’s just sent three hundred dollars and a parcel of clothes, the money you will need not to starve if the German boss finally fires you, and your child is underfoot crawling in the shag carpet with his stupid pen or his Eastern Air Lines plane, you should give him one across the neck.
The child is shuddering beneath your hand. “Ne bei menya!” Don’t hit me!
“You didn’t do the math, nasty swine (svoloch’ gadkaya).” You’ve assigned the child math problems out of a Soviet textbook that’s more age-appropriate than the bullshit they teach at his Hebrew school, pictures of 4 + 3 – 2 Great Danes and then how many doggies do you have?, instead of
f”(x) = –4 * [cos(x)cos(x) – sin(x)(–sin(x))] / cos2(x).
And the bitch wife whom your wolfish relatives tell you you should really divorce pops out of the kitchen. “Tol’ko ne golovu!” Just don’t hit his head! He has to think with the head.
“Zakroi rot vonyuchii.” Shut your stinking mouth.
Really, suka, can’t you see that love is in the air?
And then off you go, a smack across the left of the head, now the right, now the left. And the child is holding tight to the dizzying smacks, because each one is saying You’re mine and You’ll always love me, each one is a connection to the child that can never be broken. And what else is registering in that head being whipsawed left to right, right to left? The thing Mrs. R is singing in Hebrew as she’s marching the kids down the corridor. Yamin, smol, smol, yamin, left, right, right, left, troo-loo-loo-loo.
My mother has it all wrong when it comes to love. She barely hits. She is the expert on the silent treatment. If I don’t eat the farmer’s cheese with canned peaches (eighty-nine cents: Grand Union), there will be no communication. Go find your love somewhere else. To this day, my mother will launch into a particular childhood aria of mine. Apparently during one especially long period of making me unexist, I started screaming to her, “If you won’t speak to me, luchshe ne zhit’!” It is better not to live! And then I cried for hours, oh how I cried.
Luchshe ne zhit’! my mother likes to replay dramatically at Thanksgiving dinners, her hands spread out like Hamlet giving a soliloquy, perhaps because, in addition to being funny in her mind, the two-da
y-long silent treatment did what it was supposed to do. It made the child want to commit suicide without her love. It is better not to live! she cries out over her juicy Thanksgiving turkey and her “French” dessert. But I disagree with the efficacy of this technique. Yes, I don’t want to live without her love and attention and fresh laundry for a while, but the sentiment passes quickly. Noninteraction does not have the same tried-and-true result as a pummeling. When you hit the child you’re making contact. You’re contacting the child’s skin, his tender flanks, his head (with which he will eventually have to make money, true), but you are also saying something comforting: I’m here.
I’m here hitting you. I will never leave you, don’t you worry, because I am the Lord, thy father. And just as I was pummeled, so I shall pummel you, and you shall pummel yours forever, ve imru Amen. Let us say Amen.
The danger is crying, of course, because crying is surrender. You have to get away from the blows and lie down someplace quiet and then cry. You have to think of what will happen next. Which is this: The pain will turn dull, then disappear, and when the weekend comes you will play a game called War at Sea with your father, rolling the dice to see if your British heavy cruiser can get out of the way of his German U-boat fast enough or if the entire course of World War II will have to be rewritten. There is no particular segue from the beating to the game, from the explosive weekday to the quiet sausage-and-kasha rhythms of the weekend. On Saturday, your father is calling you “little son” and “little one” and any UN observer sent to this armistice would take off his helmet, get back in his jeep, and make his way back to Geneva with a happy report.
But there’s something about the tissue of the ears. Maybe a medical doctor can comment here. When you’ve been hit across the ears by your father, there’s a stinging, a shameful stinging, that not only keeps your ears red seemingly for days but makes your eyes moisten, as if from allergies. And then, against your will, you will bring your hand up to your ear and sniffle. And then your father will say the one thing you don’t want to hear, although he’ll say it in a kind weekend way: “Eh, you. Snotty.”
A year or so into my thirties I was honored to meet the remarkable Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld. Our little turboprop had made the flight between Prague and Vienna, between two literary festivals, the first time Appelfeld had touched down on German-speaking soil since he had survived the camps in his teens. Waiting for our luggage at VIE, the airport where my family had first encountered the West, the seventy-something Appelfeld told me of his brief time among the Red Army after his camp had been liberated. One of the giant Russian soldiers described to Appelfeld his treatment at the hands of his superiors: I byut i plakat’ ne dayut. They hit and they don’t let me cry after.
On the day of the beating, in my little corner I am careful with the crying, a sniffle here, a spring shower of tears there, because otherwise the asthma attack will come. But maybe I want it to come. And soon enough, my father and mother are hovering over me as if nothing had happened an hour before, and perhaps nothing has. Father bundles the red comforter around my snotty chest, and my mother readies the inhaler: “One, two, three, breathe in!”
Night falls; my parents are living through their nightmares in their bed. The relatives buried alive by the Germans in Belorussian fields are rising through the alfalfa of modern American life. The inhaler’s steroids have flooded my body. In the wood-paneled closet a man composed entirely of little pinpricks of light, The Lightman, is assembling himself. This is not a fantasy. This is not the SS or Stalin’s henchmen or even the customs agent at Pulkovo Airport in Leningrad, the one who took off my fur hat. The Lightman may have been a human being once, but now he’s just made of little shimmering dots of energy—like the nuclear energy they have inside the scary silver-domed reactor at my father’s lab—and where his eyes should be are just the white sclera, minus the iris and pupil. In Russia I would open my eyes at night and find the room flooded with bursts of light, amoeba shapes that would expand and then falter like domestic supernovas, briefly outshining even the strange phosphorous nighttime glare of the explosive Signal television set. But here, in America, what used to merely keep me awake is coming together to destroy me. The pinpricks of light have achieved humanity. The Lightman is assembling himself over and over, making himself, unmaking himself, biding his time. He slots himself inside my closet and breathes his sickly adult breath all over my shirt and my pair of pants. Because he is made almost entirely of light he can travel from beneath a door jamb; he can scamper up the walls to the ceiling in no time. And I spend the whole night watching him advance slowly but monstrously toward me, my back stiff as a board, my slapped red ear pinging for him like a homing signal. I cannot tell my parents about the Lightman because they will think I’m crazy, and there’s no room for crazy around here. It would be easier if the Lightman came up to me and did his worst, but once he’s within inches of me he disassembles himself, becomes just a bunch of floating light specks and a pair of eyeless eyes, as if he knows that once he’s fully revealed himself I’ll have nothing to fear.
The next day, there I am, sleepless and angry. Everything we do here at the Solomon Schechter School of Queens is, in a way, an exchange of ideas. Jerry Himmelstein sees me coming; the spittle is arching from his lips and blowing in the wind. He looks at me with dull unhappiness. This is how it must be, and there is no return from what we must do.
I punch him in the stomach, the soft American plushiness of it.
He takes two steps back and breathes out.
“Agoof.”
The garden apartment (second floor, right) where the author grew short, dark, and furry.
THE TERRIBLE THING about the major belief systems (Leninism, Christianity) is that too often they are constructed along the premise that a difficult past can be traded in for a better future, that all adversity leads to triumph, either through the installation of telegraph poles (Leninism) or at Jesus’ knee after physical death (Christianity). But the past is not simply redeemable for a better future. Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing now, or will experience ever. I guess what I’m saying is that not everybody should have children.
But in 1981 triumph is at hand. An official letter arrives in our mailbox. MR. S. SHITGART, YOU HAVE ALREADY WON $10,000,000.00!!! Sure, our last name is misspelled rather cruelly, but cardstock this thick does not lie, and the letter is from a major American publisher, to wit the Publishers Clearing House. I open the letter with shaking hands, and … a check falls out.
PAY TO THE ORDER OF S. SHITGART
TEN MILLION AND 00/100 DOLLARS
Our lives are about to change. I run down the stairs into the courtyard of our apartment complex. “Mama, Papa, we won! We won! My millionery!” We are millionaires!
“Uspokoisya,” my father says. Calm down. “Do you want an asthma attack?” But he is nervous and excited himself. Tak, tak. Let us see what we have here.
Around the glowing surface of the orange dining table imported from Romania we spread the contents of the voluminous packet. For two years we have been good new citizens, watching X-rated movies, getting jobs as engineers and clerk-typists (my mother’s pianist’s fingers will finally be put to meaningful use), learning to Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of American, And For the Something For Which That It Stands, Unavoidable, With Money For All.
“Bozhe moi,” my mother says, my God, as we look at the pictures of a Mercedes flying off the deck of our yacht toward our new mansion with an Olympian swimming pool. “Oy, does it have to be a Mercedes? Tphoo, Nazis.” “Don’t worry, we can trade for a Cadillac.” “Bozhe moi. How many bedrooms does this house have?” “Seven, eight, nine …” “You said the kids at school have houses like this?” “No, Papa, this one, ours, will be bigger!” “Hm, the way I understand it, the house doesn’t come with the prize. The prize is just ten million, and then we buy the house separately.” “Tphoo, they always say here ‘sol
d separately.’ ” “You can forget about the yacht, it’s dangerous.” “But I know how to swim, Mama!” “How do you keep the pool open in the winter? Snow will get in.” “Look, there are palm trees! Maybe it’s in Florida.” “Florida won’t be good for your asthma with all that humidity.” “I want to live in Miami! Maybe there aren’t Hebrew schools in Miami.” “Everywhere in America there are Hebrew schools.” “We could have been in San Francisco already, if not for your wolfish relatives.” “San Francisco? With the earthquakes?” “For ten million we can live in two places!” “Remember we have to pay taxes, so it’s more like five million.” “Oy, those welfare queens will get our other five million, like President Reagan said.” “Tphoo, welfare queens.”
We sit down and, using our collective four-hundred-word English vocabulary, begin to unravel the many documents before us. If we take the ten-million-dollar check to the bank tomorrow, how long before we can buy a new air conditioner? Wait, it says here that … Yes, we have already won the ten million dollars, no disputing that, but a panel of judges still has to award the money to us. First we must fill out the winner’s form and select five national magazines that will be sent to us free, or at least the first issue of each will be free, and then the Americans will likely send us the rest of the money. Fair enough. First we must acclimate to our new wealth, expand our literacy. I am proud of Papa’s new car, a bulbous 1977 Chevrolet Malibu Classic with only seven million miles on the odometer, but it is time to get acquainted with the finer autos, so I order Car and Motor, Motor and Driver, Carburetor and Driver, Muffler and Owner. And for the last selection, something that maybe has my Star Wars Monkey, Chewy, in it: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
Little Failure Page 13
