“Can I make number two before line-up?”
“Yes, Martin.”
“Can I clean my nose?”
“If it isn’t a noisy operation.”
“Can I write my brother?”
Ed leaned over and whispered to Breavman, “He has no brother.”
When they were asleep he ran to the kitchen, where there was a telephone. He phoned Shell in New York. He wanted her voice to obliterate the day. He wanted to hear her say the word “darling.” He had phoned her half a dozen times from the city and he owed a huge bill.
He gave nothing to her and waited, reading over and over the Telephone Company’s printed instructions on how to dial a number. An interior voice was screaming: It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
Shell told him how much she loved Joseph Conrad.
They said good-bye softly, both of them knowing the three minutes had failed.
He wrote for two hours, describing the day in detail. The black-fly bites on his arm disturbed him and he put that down. His Indian jacket was too hot but he didn’t feel like taking it off. He put that down.
7
Martin fascinated him. He reckoned that he had misinterpreted Martin’s expression. It was not vacant terror but general wonder. He was that rarest creature, a blissful mad-child. The other children understood his election and treated him with a kind of bemused awe.
One afternoon they entertained themselves by encircling Martin and firing large numbers at him to multiply.
He rocked back and forth, like a man at prayer, his eyes closed. He beat his thighs with open palms as he thought, like an awkward bird trying to leave the ground, and made a buzzing sound as though his mind were machinery.
“Em-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m …”
“Look at him go!”
“Em-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m …”
“C’mon, Martin boy!”
“Eighty-one thousand, nine hundred and eighteen.” he announced, opening his eyes. The boys cheered and hugged him.
Then he caught sight of a small pine tree. He stopped dead, stared, and walked out of the circle. Breavman followed him.
“Are you okay?”
“Oh yes. I believe I’d better count these.”
Until supper he amused himself by discovering how many needles there were on an average pine tree.
Krantz was annoyed when he discovered what Breavman’s afternoon activity was.
“That isn’t what Mrs. Stark pays her money for.”
“No?”
It was incredible that they should have put themselves into a position where one could castigate the other.
“Not to have her son used as a side-show freak.”
“What does she pay her money for?”
“Come off it, Breavman. You know it wasn’t healthy. She wants the kid to be like everyone else – integrated, inconspicuous. It’s hard enough on her as it is.”
“Okay, we’ll force him into baseball.”
“Infractions of the regulations will be severely disciplined, Herr Breavman.”
8
A horse-shoe of hills rose behind the bunks. On one of the hills there was an amphitheatre with wooden benches and stage. It was used for plays, singsongs, and on Sabbath as a House of Prayer.
How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob,
and thy dwelling place, O Israel …
They sang in Hebrew, their voices mingling with the sunlight. It was fragrant there, the pines high, blasted, and black. The camp was assembled in white clothes.
That’s how we are beautiful, he thought, that’s the only time – when we sing. Storm troopers, band of crusaders, gang of stinking slaves, righteous citizens – only tolerable when their voices ring in unison. Any imperfect song hints at the ideal theme.
Ed told a wonderful Sholem Aleichem story about a young boy who wanted to play the fiddle but was forbidden to by his Orthodox parents. For a minute Breavman thought he would overdo it, but no, he swayed and danced under his imaginary fiddle and everyone believed him.
The same Ed who bet with a girl’s body.
Breavman sat thinking that he could never do as well, never be so calm and magical. And that’s what he wanted to be: the gentle hero the folk come to love, the man who talks to animals, the Baal Shem Tov who carried children piggy-back.
He would never be able to pronounce a Jewish word with any confidence.
“Krantz,” he whispered, “why weren’t we allowed to cross the tracks?”
Twelve righteous faces told him to shh.
Still, and he knew it was arrogance, he often considered himself the Authentic Jew. His background had taught him the alien experience. He was grateful for that. Now he extended that experience to his own people.
What was it all about anyhow? A solitary man in a desert, begging for the inclination of a face.
Anne performed a Hasidic dance, annihilating anything womanly in her body with the crammed, ironic movements. But for a few moments they were lost in Europe, their skins untanned, waiting in narrow streets for miracles and the opportunity for revenge they would never take.
After the Sabbath services a butterfly seemed to follow him down the hill, disappearing as he left the wooded area for the hot campus. He felt the honour of it all through the day.
9
“It’s so hard,” said Shell’s voice. “Everybody has a body.”
“I know,” Breavman said. “And there’s one point in an evening when the thing most urgently needed is just an arm around the shoulder.”
“I’m so glad we can still talk.”
Her honesty obliged her to describe her temptations. She wanted to keep nothing from him. They both understood the danger of this technique: there are humans that desire me. Keep me or they will.
He leaned against the wall in the dark kitchen and listened. How curious that anyone should speak to him so softly! How had he managed to arrange the miracle in which someone spoke softly to him? It was a magic he was sure he never possessed, like reading one’s first poems. But here was his own name whispered.
An ugly forecast developed in his heart that he would drive the whisperer to a hundred indifferent beds and silence her.
“Shell, I’m coming to New York tomorrow!”
“You’re quitting camp?”
“There’s nothing for me here.”
“Oh, Lawrence.”
It was raining when he went outside, her voice
