Feathers

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine 1. “The boy needs to be kept an eye on,” declared Ahuva Haris, who, let in that same day on the secret of my ties with Leder, insisted I wear a small linen bag full of camphor balls around my neck. As oil repelled water, she promised my mother, so the sharp smell of the crystalline substance would ward off Leder and his evil likes. Meanwhile , under her eagle eye, her husband Binyamin, whom she had dragged from his sickbed to our house, inspected the mezuzahs in our doorways and found them wanting. With a whoop of triumph Ahuva pointed at the crumpled talismans of parchment lying on our kitchen table and declared that the absence of certain letters from their sacred formulae was the cause of all our aggravation. “Just as a zeppelin has to crash once the hydrogen leaks out of it,” she announced rhetorically, scolding Mother for her negligence, “so a house with faulty mezuzahs is asking for trouble.” Every evening of that week Ahuva turned up again with some new charm for me in her purse. “I’ve brought the child a yarmulke that was once worn by the Hofetz-Hayim,” she announced on one of her late-hour, emergency visits while whisking away my dark blue skullcap with the name of my school in light blue on it, which she declared was no more Jewish than the beanies worn by the Pope and his crowd of cardinals. Reverently she laid the decrepit, sweat-soaked covering on my head with a prayer that, from now on, mercy and peace might rest upon me. My mother balked and sought to remove it, fearful that I might, God forbid, catch lice or ringworm but Ahuva lightly slapped her outstretched hand and remarked that the lice of the great Rabbi of Radin were worth all the soap and Lysol of the Zionists. Another time she stormed into our apartment with an embroi- dered hallah cloth in which was wrapped a wrinkled scrap of old paper covered with a sinuous rabbinical hand that turned out to be the actual writing of the holy Rabbi Israel of Shklov, who had settled in Safed over a century ago. Ahuva had been lent it after much pleading by the granddaughter of Rabbi Israel’s great-granddaughter, who lived in Jerusalem. “Put it under his pillow while he sleeps,” she whispered, confident that its curative powers would repair my addled brain. “Leder is a direct descendent of the snake in the Garden of Eden,” my mother’s friend informed me that Saturday night after having totally ignored me for the five days. Her hands made serpentine motions in the direction of my throat. “A snake that grew legs!” Once, when she was a child, she related, she had descended into the basement of her house, where among the palm fronds and stored sukkah walls that were awaiting the Feast of Booths she discovered a ball of golden thread, all prettily aglitter like silk—and had it not been for her mother, who appeared just in the nick of time to spank her soundly, she would never have known that the seductive beauty she was playing with was in fact a viper’s nest. It would be best, she told my mother, to transfer me from the school I attended to the truly pious Shiloh School or the Yavneh Talmud Torah, where I would be given a proper Jewish education. My father, who had thus far suffered in silence our garrulous guest’s intervention in the family’s affairs, could control himself no longer. According to Jewish law, he said to my mother, in words meant for Ahuva, he alone was responsible for the education of his son, which was no one else’s business. “Ahuva is not no one,” my mother struck back, mimicking my father ’s manner of speech. If she were him, she added, she would keep her mouth shut, since on the day he began hanging around with Riklin he lost all right to decide how his son should be raised. “It’s you who ran out on this house!” my father retorted. If my mother would only think of what she had done, she would realize that all the trouble I had gotten into—my worsening marks at school, my having stopped borrowing books from the B’nai Brith library, my friendship with Leder—had begun on the day she took to sneaking out after lunch with...