Collected Short Stories: Volume II

by Barry Rachin

  “Not much of a security risk,” Peter noted, “even by the most demanding standards.” The bus to Elait pulled into the quay and the passengers began jostling one another in anticipation of boarding. Peter found an empty seat toward the rear of the bus. The bedraggled, chip-toothed women with the upside-down chicken did not board the bus. Through the open window, he watched as the beefy brunette handed the Arab back his identification papers and sauntered away. Still struggling with the unwieldy gun, her friend hurried after her. Old enough to be the girls’ great-grandfather, the Arab adjusted the rope-like band on his headset and gawked at the retreating soldiers.

  Later that afternoon near the center of Hebron, a gang of Palestinian youths blocked the main road with a jumble of burning truck tires, while others were tearing up cobblestones and hurling them at the Jewish troops, who hung back seeking refuge in doorways and behind trees. A young toddler clutching a doll - she couldn’t have been more than eighteen months - sat on the curb watching the chaos with a gentle smile, until an elderly woman whisked her up and disappeared down an unpaved alley. The younger children laughed like it was a holiday; their older brothers and sisters hooted and jeered in defiant rage.

  For their part, the Israeli soldiers ignored the youngest and their foolish antics. They looked nervous and with good reason. On a rooftop a masked youth waved a bottle filled with clear liquid. A dirty rag dangled from the neck of the Molotov cocktail inviting instant horror and disfigurement. And then, like a fourth of July cherry bomb, the gun exploded. An Israeli soldier shot a woman in the stomach as she passed quietly in the street on her way home from market. A single round squeezed from a high-powered, assault rifle. Peter watched the pregnant woman crumple to the ground clutching her side, the groceries - eggs, bread, Turkish coffee, cheese and milk - scattered in the dirt and rubble. Several Arabs, their faces hidden behind plaid kaffiyehs, carried the woman away without waiting for the Red Crescent ambulance howling in the distance.

  Only the week before, the Jerusalem Post revealed that IDF soldiers were using rubber bullets rather than live ammunition for crowd control. Rubber bullets. Crowd control. Both the woman and the unborn child died en route to hospital. Throughout the West Bank during the intifada, beatings, injuries and fatalities were commonplace. In Gaza a teenager was brain-damaged, bludgeoned into a vegetative state by a hate-crazed Israeli soldier. A thirteen year-old girl shot in the head in Jericho. An elderly man, overcome by tear gas, suffered a fatal heart attack. The difference: the victims being anonymous, faceless, Peter felt no intimate connection. No personal culpability. In Hebron, he witnessed senseless murder.

  The next day, Peter went to a kiosk around the corner from his apartment and bought copies of the two largest, Hebrew papers. Yediot Achronoat reported that a 27 year-old woman and her unborn child had died of accidental wounds in the Gaza Strip. The woman was survived by a husband and three young children. Maariv offered no obituary, focusing on renewed violence anticipated in the wake of the double funeral. No mention of a military inquest. No expression of rage, regret, remorse, sorrow, repentance, grief, collective guilt or wrongdoing. Not even a compound sentence-worth of editorial comment or sympathetic reflection. Nothing.

  Peter finished out the semester at the yeshiva, went home and withdrew from school. A month later, Rabbi Abramson telephoned and asked what happened. “Nothing I care to talk about.”

  “This is no answer,” the rabbi countered.

  “It’s the best I can do.”

  “Why have you turned against your faith?”

  In the past the stubby, bearded man smelling of stale tobacco filled him with reverence and awe. Now he viewed the rabbi as preposterous, grotesque. “If I tried to explain, you would tease the truth into a corner and then turn it to your own advantage. Black would become white; night transformed into day; up refashioned into down. The Jewish approach.”

  The rabbi exploded in a raspy, smoker’s cough. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “An eschatological nightmare. A teleological pile of shit.” Peter hung up the phone.

  Fifty feet away at the full-sized pool Maria Espinosa, Peter’s Puerto Rican girl friend, was slathering her thighs with sun block. They’d been dating three months now. She adjusted the halter on her French-cut bikini. Rising from the chaise lounge, she slipped her bare feet into a pair of Dr. Scholl’s sandals and strutted back and forth along the lip of the adult pool. With Maria it was a territorial thing, like a coyote peeing on a bush. On a good day, there weren’t a half-dozen women who could match her fleshy charm. And she knew it. Ruthie Abramson was no threat; the behavior was reflexive, involuntary like breathing or moving her bowels.

  “I’m leaving for Israel in two months,” Ruthie said and handed Peter a piece of paper with her address and telephone number written in bold print. “How soon can we start?”

  The boy who bellyfopped into the pool only a few minutes earlier, went crashing into the water again - a four year-old recidivist. Peter removed him from the pool and told the boy he was persona non grata remainder of the week. Ignoring Ruthie’s question, Peter wagged a finger at the book. “What’s Mr. Pinsker’s weltanschauung?”

  “Only a handful of Jews can live peaceably among Christians at any given time. Once the population crosses a critical threshold, pogroms, looting and rape.”

  “An arithmetic formula for ethnic strife.” Peter nearly burst into hysterical laughter. “The number of local Jews divided by square miles equals impending calamity?”

  Ruthie was unperturbed by his antics. “Something of the sort.”

  Peter’s expression darkened. “Israelis view Theodore Herzl as the father of their country - a Jewish George Washington. His portrait hangs in municipal buildings from the southern port of Elait to Keriat Shemona on the Lebanese foothills. But Herzl, unlike Pinsker, was essentially a pluralist; under the right circumstances, he believed all races and religions could live peaceably.”

  “History proved him wrong,” Ruthie countered. “Will you teach me modern Hebrew?”

  “Haven’t decided.”

  When she was gone, Peter realized they hadn’t even discussed a fee. He raised the whistle to his lips and blew a shrill blast. “Everyone out of the pool!”

  “Who was that strange girl?” Maria asked.

  It was after five, and they were driving home together. Peter rested his free hand on her thigh. “Ruthie Abramson. She’s leaving shortly to study in Israel. Probably intends to emigrate. Forfeit her American citizenship… join the Israeli Army and dedicate her life to tormenting and denigrating the Palestinian masses.” Maria pushed his probing hand away from her crotch. She was used to his satirical excesses. “Ruthie,” Peter continued, “will marry a member of Mossad, the Israeli secret police, give birth to ten children - all sons, cannon fodder for the next generation.”

  “Such an ugly woman!”

  “Peculiar looking.”

  “Even by the most forgiving standards,” Maria qualified, “that woman was ugly.”

  They passed the Mobil gas station and turned left on Thatcher Street. “She had this book,” Peter said.

  “What sort of book?”

  From the moment he spoke, Peter regretted mentioning the tattered text - as though talking about it was an implicit breach of trust. Religious scholars taken aside, how many educated Jews had ever heard of Leo Pinsker and his cockeyed theory of human devolution? Before Ruthie Abramson’s arrival, he certainly hadn’t. The book was an oddity, an ethnic aberration. He was not about to discuss 19th century Zionism with Maria Espinosa, a woman who worked in a nail salon, listened to gangsta rap (Queen Latifa and DJ Cool J) and, for the solitary semester she attended Rhode Island Community College, just barely pulled a C average. “The book was nothing really.”

  Maria’s parents immigrated to Brandenburg, Massachusetts, in the early seventies from Cayey (population 23,000) in the mountainous southwestern district, inland from the Caribbean. The father managed a
tobacco plantation; Mrs. Espinosa worked for the Post Exchange at the nearby Henry Barracks, a U.S. military facility.

  Peter met the leggy, dark-skinned girl in early June when Maria came to the swimming pool with her younger sister. Nothing subtle in her romantic style, on the third visit she sashayed up to the lifeguard’s chair and asked, “You got a girlfriend, Cutie?” Maria wore a mint green bikini and a gold crucifix, which alternately vanished then reemerged from her cleavage. Only by an effort of will, could Peter refrain from gawking at the erotically hypnotic cross.

  From the beginning, Maria had her priorities in order: the Catholic Church, her work at the nail salon, helping her mother with domestic chores, the Catholic Church, satisfying Peter’s carnal needs, the Catholic Church. Raw sex posed no obstacle to religious devotion; on the third date, they went to bed. “I go to church on all saint’s days and holy days of obligation,” she explained. “The rest takes care of itself.”

  The rest did strangely take care of itself.

  Maria brought a bare-bones simplicity to the relationship that Peter initially found unnerving. A perverse mental image crept into his mind: a dark-skinned troll (resembling the dwarf in the TV series Fantasy Island) with an old-fashioned, straw broom sweeping all troubling thoughts and unpleasantness from Maria Espinosa’s lithe mind. And yet, Maria manifested an unflagging constancy, a generosity of spirit and optimism that turned a potential character flaw into a full-fledged asset.

  When they pulled up in front of Maria’s apartment, she noted, “I shouldn’t have said the Jewish girl was ugly. In all the ways that count, I’m sure she’s perfectly nice.”

  Peter gazed out the window. On the telephone lines, fourteen pairs - he had actually counted them - of tattered sneakers hung where their owners had flung them the previous spring. It was a wacky rite of passage, a game inner-city, latchkey brats played, snaring their worn-out sneakers in the overhead lines.

  What to do about Ruthie Abramson? It wasn’t the demand on his time that irritated him but the utopian ardor; the fever-pitched idealism struck too close to home. He would call her in a day or two and politely decline. Or ignore the matter altogether. Peter felt no personal obligation. Let her illustrious father find a bona fide, Jewish zealot to teach his daughter the sacred tongue.

  Around seven, Maria called. “My parents went to the movies. Come over and we’ll have some fun.”

  “I got a sore throat,” Peter lied. After supper, he drove to the Brandenberg Library and browsed the computer catalog. There were no listings for Leo Pinsker. Not there or at any branch in the lending network. In volume 9, page 456 of the Encyclopedia Britannica he found the following entry:

  Leo Pinsker. Born 1821 in Toaszów, Poland. Died December 21, 1891. Russian-Polish physician and pioneer Jewish nationalist who was a forerunner of Theodore Herzl. Joined the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia, an assimilationist organization. Founded in 1863, the organization advocated secular education for Jews and the translation of the Bible and prayer books into Russian.

  A pogrom in Odessa in 1871 shook but did not destroy Pinsker’s beliefs; in 1881, however, another severe pogrom broke out in Odessa not only ignored but abetted by the government and defended by the press. His assimilationist beliefs were shattered and he turned to Jewish nationalism.

  In 1882 Pinsker anonymously published in German an incisive, embittered and impassioned pamphlet, Auto-Emancipation of the Jews, which provoked strong reaction both critical and commendatory from Jewish leaders. In the pamphlet he contended that the only restorative for Jewish dignity was a Jewish Homeland.

  Ants yes, humans no. According to Pinsker, an obscure, 19th century Jew and historical anomaly, society was based on the faulty premise that people could live together. After two pogroms, Pinsker was driven back to the Zionist fold. The cosmopolitan assimilationist and enlightened freethinker metamorphosed into a rabid nationalist!

  Peter went to the pay phone in the lobby of the library and called Maria. “Can I come over?”

  “Feeling better?”

  “What?”

  “The sore throat.”

  “Much better.”

  At night the tattered sneakers gave the street a gritty, mean-spirited grimness less evident in the morning hours. Peter parked in the street and entered the house. Maria was in the living room reading La Semana. He reached for the topmost button on her blouse, but she wriggled free. “My parents will be home any time now.” She folded the newspaper neatly in her lap.

  “Mujeres tras rejas, ” he read the caption. “What’s it mean?”

  “Woman behind bars,” she translated. “It’s a weekly column about Hispanic women who do stupid shit when they come to America.”

  “Such as.” His mind was racing, free associating. Streams of consciousness ricocheting off continents, caroming among races, centuries, disassociated circumstances.

  Maria scrunched up her nutmeg face. “A silly, made-up story really… a Columbian woman carries a boyfriend’s package in her luggage. When the plane lands in New York, the authorities open her suitcase, discover drugs, and she’s thrown in jail. Her children come to visit her tras rejas, behind bars. A good woman’s life is ruined, spirit broken because of one act of stupidity.”

  Peter took the paper and flipped it over. “And this?”

  “Why the sudden interest in Hispanic culture?”

  “Just tell me what it says.”

  Maria read the script, lips moving soundlessly, as her eyes scanned the newsprint. “A bank on Federal Hill is offering low-interest mortgages to first-time home owners of minority background. The bank has Spanish-speaking loan officers for anyone speaking English as a second language.”

  Peter pointed to the picture of a grown man dressed in a tan uniform with a red scarf knotted around his neck. “Hector Gonzales. Started the first Hispanic boy scout troop which meets regularly at the YMCA on Broad Street in Providence. Mr. Gonzales, a native of Honduras, welcomes new applicants.”

  “A newspaper like any other,” Peter said.

  “What did you expect?”

  He flung the newspaper on the sofa. “A apostate Jew and a Puerto Rican Catholic… if we have any long-term future together, it’s as Americans… only Americans!”

  “Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States,” she countered blandly. “We can’t vote, but in most other respects, Puerto Ricans are.” Maria rapped Peter’s head lightly with her knuckles. “This conversation is getting weirder by the minute. It would have been better if you came over earlier and we—”

  “Only as Americans,” he muttered and rushed out the door.

  Later that night Peter dreamed of the pregnant Palestinian woman.

  With Pinsker and Herzl, he attended the wake. Speaking in Esperanto, Herzl, the pluralist, told the Arab mourners, “Rabbi Joseph ben Akiba taught that love of one’s fellow humans is the central commandment; people have free will, and God’s attitude toward the world is tempered with mercy and justice.”

  Too distraught for words, Pinsker sat in a darkened corner weeping and rocking back and forth on his heels. The deceased’s husband approached and, putting an arm around his shoulders, whispered, “So nice of you to come in our time of sorrow.”

  Back to Table of Contents

  No More Piano Lessons

  Muriel Beagle was an awful piano teacher. An abomination! Which is why, Allan Swanson blew a mental gasket when his ex-wife asked if he would shuttle their daughter, Ruthie, to her Thursday afternoon lessons from late April straight through until the end of school.

  It had been an amicable divorce. Lois, who was newly remarried, seldom bugged Allan when he fell behind with child support payments or his share of their daughter's expenses. The only thing she asked was that he pitched in for the kid's music lesson. Being a professional musician, a saxophonist on the wedding-bar mitzvah circuit, it seemed crass not to oblige. Thirty minutes - that's all Mrs. Beagle allotted per lesson, and most
days she started late or was interrupted by one of her bratty kids bursting in unannounced. Lost time was never recouped on the back end of the lesson, and once, the music teacher even took a cell phone call and it wasn't an emergency. So unprofessional!

  In the divorce agreement, Allan got shared custody. Ruthie, who turned twelve on the third of the month, visited weekends and slept over straight through to Monday mornings. One afternoon three weeks earlier, she was playing the Love Theme from Doctor Zhivago. Reaching the bridge, her fingers stumbled over an eighth-note run. "You left out a beat."

  "No I didn't." The child’s tone was brusque and dismissive. "I played it just fine."

  "No, look… When you started the ascending triplets -"

  "I've played the tune exactly the same for Mrs. Beagle," Ruthie insisted, "and she never complained. Not once!"

  Check. Checkmate. What could he say?

  The piano teacher gave lessons in a claustrophobically small den just off the kitchen. At the following lesson, Allan sat outside the door in an equally tiny vestibule as Ruthie played through the delicate waltz. When she reached the bridge where the melody modulated down a minor third, Ruthie dropped a whole note. He waited for Mrs. Beagle to cut her off, to point out the musical indiscretion.

  Nothing! Further along, Ruthie fingered the major seventh on a dominant arpeggio. Allan cringed inwardly. The teacher let the musical mayhem pass without comment. A major seventh in a dominant chord - Allan almost lost his lunch.

  "She's coming along nicely don't you think?" The lesson was over and Mrs. Beagle was standing in the door way with her arm draped around his daughter's shoulder.