Goodbye, Columbus

by Philip Roth

He smacked his free hand to his in-sucked cheek, gently. “Oy, Gut!” And then quickly as he was able, 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 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 Yakoy Blotnik and you once had a cat on the roof.

  When the engines, all four of them, arrived, Rabbi Binder had four times given Ozzie the count of three. The big hook-and-ladder swung around the comer and one of the firemen leaped from it, plunging headlong towards the yellow fire hydrant in front of the synagogue. With a huge wrench he began to unscrew the top nozzle. Rabbi Binder raced over to him and pulled at his shoulder.

  “There’s no fire…”

  The fireman mumbled back over his shoulder 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 fire hat, 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 comer, 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, Yakoy 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 comer. 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 comer, 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 lone 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 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 clicked down 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 towards 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 towards 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.”

  As though it were 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, whatever it was. “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 turned 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 Don’t 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 an unexpected click down and the new darkness, 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 towards the synagogue entrance. “Make him 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 Yakoy 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 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 an 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 the hoy 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, 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.

  DEFENDER OF THE FAITH

  IN MAY of 1945, only a few weeks after the fighting had ended in Europe, I was rotated back to the States, where I spent the remainder of the war with a training company at Camp Crowder, Missouri. Along with the rest of the Ninth Army, I had been racing across Germany so swiftly during the late winter and spring that when I boarded the plane, I couldn’t believe its destination lay to the west. My mind might inform me otherwise, but there was an inertia of the spirit that told me we were flying to a new front, where we would disembark and continue our push eastward—eastward until we’d circled the globe, marching through villages along whose twisting cobbled streets crowds of the enemy would watch us take possession of what, up till then, they’d considered their own. I had changed enough in two years not to mind the trembling of the old people the crying of the very young the uncertainty and fear in the eyes of the once arrogant I had been fortunate enough to develop an infantryman’s heart, which, like his feet, at first aches and swells but finally grows horny enough for him to travel the weirdest paths; without feeling a thing.

  Captain Paul Barrett was my CO. in Camp Crowder. The day I reported for duty, he came out of his office to shake my hand. He was short, gruff, and fiery, and—indoors or out—he wore his polished helmet liner pulled down to his little eyes. In Europe, he had received a battlefield commission and a serious chest wound, and he’d been returned to the States only a few months before. He spoke easily to me, and at the evening formation he introduced me to the troops. “Gentlemen,” he said, “Sergeant Thurston as you know is no longer with this company Your new first sergeant is Sergeant Nathan Marx here He is a veteran of the European theater and consequently will expect to find a company of soldiers here, and not a company of boys.”

  I sat up late in the orderly room that evening, trying halfheartedly to solve the riddle of duty rosters, personnel forms, and morning reports. The Charge of Quarters slept with his mouth open on a mattress on the floor. A trainee stood reading the next day’s duty roster, which was posted on the bulletin board just inside the screen door. It was a warm evening, and I could hear radios playing dance music over in the barracks. The trainee, who had been staring at me whenever he thought I wouldn’t notice, finally took a step in my direction.

  “Hey, Sarge—we having a G.I. party tomorrow night?” he asked. A G.I. party is a barracks cleaning.

  “You usually have them on Friday nights?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, and then he added, mysteriously, “that’s the whole thing.”

  “Then you’ll have a G.I. party.”

  He turned away, and I heard him
mumbling. His shoulders were moving, and I wondered if he was crying.

  “What’s your name, soldier?” I asked.

  He turned, not crying at all. Instead, his green-speckled eyes, long and narrow, flashed like fish in the sun. He walked over to me and sat on the edge of my desk. He reached out a hand. “Sheldon,” he said.

  “Stand on your feet, Sheldon.”

  Getting off the desk, he said, “Sheldon Grossbart.” He smiled at the familiarity into which he’d led me.

  “You against cleaning the barracks Friday night, Grossbart?” I said. “Maybe we shouldn’t have G.I. parties. Maybe we should get a maid.” My tone startled me. I felt I sounded like every top sergeant I had ever known.

  “No, Sergeant.” He grew serious, but with a seriousness that seemed to be only the stifling of a smile. “It’s just—G.I. parties on Friday night, of all nights.”

  He slipped up onto the corner of the desk again—not quite sitting, but not quite standing, either. He looked at me with those speckled eyes flashing, and then made a gesture with his hand. It was very slight—no more than a movement back and forth of the wrist—and yet it managed to exclude from our affairs everything else in the orderly room, to make the two of us the center of the world. It seemed, in fact, to exclude everything even about the two of us except our hearts.

  “Sergeant Thurston was one thing,” he whispered, glancing at the sleeping C.Q., “but we thought that with you here things might be a little different.”

  “We?”

  “The Jewish personnel.”

  “Why?” I asked, harshly. “What’s on your mind?” Whether I was still angry at the “Sheldon” business, or now at something else, I hadn’t time to tell, but clearly I was angry.

  “We thought you—Marx, you know, like Karl Marx. The Marx Brothers. Those guys are all—M-a-r-x. Isn’t that how you spell it, Sergeant?”

  “M-a-r-x.”