“Rain, rain, go away, come again some oddeh day. Rain, rain, go away, come again some oddeh day. Rain, rain—”
He’d better go in before the rest of the rabbi’s pupils came. They’d get ahead of him otherwise. He turned and trudged through the dim battered corridor. The yard was gloomy. Wash-poles creaked and swayed, pulleys jangled. In a window overhead, a bulky, bare-armed woman shrilled curses at someone behind her and hastily hauled in the bedding that straddled the sills like bulging sacks.
“And your guts be plucked!” her words rang out over the yard. “Couldn’t you tell me it was raining?”
He dove through the rain, skidded over the broken flagstones and fell against the cheder door. As he stumbled in, the rabbi, who was lighting the gas-jet, looked around.
“A black year befall you!” he growled. “Why don’t you come in like a man?”
Without answering, he sidled meekly over to the bench beside the wall and sat down. What did he yell at him for? He hadn’t meant to burst in that way. Gee! The growing gas-light revealed another pupil in the room whom he hadn’t noticed before. It was Mendel. His neck swathed in white bandages, sickly white under the bleary yellow flicker of gas, he sat before the reading table, head propped by elbows. Mendel was nearing his bar-mitzvah but had never learned to read chumish because he had entered the cheder at a rather late age. He was lucky, so every one said, because he had a carbuncle on the back of his neck which prevented him from attending school. And so all week long, he had arrived first at the cheder. David wondered if he dared sit down beside him. The rabbi looked angry. However, he decided to venture it and crawled quietly over the bench beside Mendel. The pungent reek of medicine pried his nostrils.
— Peeuh! It stinks!
He edged away. Dull-eyed, droopy-lipped, Mendel glanced down at him and then turned to watch the rabbi. The latter drew a large blue book from a heap on the shelf and then settled himself on his pillowed chair.
“Strange darkness,” he said, squinting at the rain-chipped window. “A stormy Friday.”
David shivered. Beguiled by the mildness of noon, he had left the house wearing only his thin blue jersey. Now, without a fire in the round-bellied stove and without other bodies to lend their warmth to the damp room, he felt cold.
“Now,” said the rabbi stroking his beard, “this is the ‘Haftorah’ to Jethro — something you will read at your bar mitzvah, if you live that long.” He wet his thumb and forefinger and began pinching the top of each page in such a way that the whole leaf seemed to wince from his hand and flip over as if fleeing of its own accord. David noted with surprise that unlike the rabbi’s other books this one had as yet none of its corners lopped off. “It’s the ‘Sedrah’ for that week,” he continued, “and since you don’t know any chumish, I’ll tell you what it means after you’ve read it.” He picked up the pointer, but instead of pointing to the page suddenly lifted his hand.
In spite of himself, Mendel contracted.
“Ach!” came the rabbi’s impatient grunt. “Why do you spring like a goat? Can I hit you?” And with the blunt end of the pointer, he probed his ear, his swarthy face painfully rippling about his bulbous nose into the margins of his beard and skull-cap. He scraped the brown clot of wax against the table leg and pointed to the page. “Begin, Beshnos mos.”
“Beshnos mos hamelech Uziyahu vaereh es adonoi,” Mendel swung into the drone.
For want of anything better to do, David looked on, vying silently with Mendel. But the pace soon proved too fast for him — Mendel’s swift sputter of gibberish tripped his own laggard lipping. He gave up the chase and gazed vacantly at the rain-chipped window. In a house across the darkened yard, lights had been lit and blurry figures moved before them. Rain strummed on the roof, and once or twice through the steady patter, a muffled rumble filtered down, as if a heavy object were being dragged across the floor above.
— Bed on wheels. Upstairs. (His thoughts rambled absently between the confines of the drone of the voice and the drone of the rain.) Gee how it’s raining. It won’t stop. Even if he finishes, I can’t go. If he read chumish, could race him, could beat him I bet. But that’s because he has to stop … Why do you have to read chumish? No fun … First you read, Adonoi elahenoo abababa, and then you say, And Moses said you mustn’t, and then you read some more abababa and then you say, mustn’t eat in the traife butcher store. Don’t like it any way. Big brown bags hang down from the hooks. Ham. And all kinds of grey wurst with like marbles in ’em. Peeuh! And chickens without feathers in boxes, and little bunnies in that store on First Avenue by the elevated. In a wooden cage with lettuce, and rocks, they eat too, on those stands. Rocks all colors. They bust ’em open with a knife and shake out ketchup on the snot inside. Yich! and long, black, skinny snakes. Peeuh! Goyim eat everything …
“Veeshma es kol adonoi omair es mi eshlach.” Mendel was reading swiftly this afternoon. The rabbi turned the page. Overhead that distant rumbling sound.
— Bed on wheels again … But how did Moses know? Who told him? God told him. Only eat kosher meat, that’s how. Mustn’t eat meat and then drink milk. Mama don’t care except when Bertha was looking! How she used to holler on her because she mixed up the meat-knives with the milk-knives. It’s a sin.… So God told him eat in your own meat markets … That time with mama in the chicken market when we went. Where all the chickens ran around — cuckacucka — when did I say? Cucka. Gee! Funny. Some place I said. And then the man with a knife went zing! Eee! Blood and wings. And threw him down. Even kosher meat when you see, you don’t want to eat—
“Enough!” The rabbi tapped his pointer on the table.
Mendel stopped reading and slumped back with a puff of relief.
“Now I’ll tell you a little of what you read, then what it means. Listen to me well that you may remember it. Beshnas mos hamelech.” The two nails of his thumb and forefinger met. “In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw God. And God was sitting on his throne, high in heaven and in his temple — Understand?” He pointed upward.
Mendel nodded, grimacing as he eased the bandage round his neck.
— Gee! And he saw Him. Wonder where? (David, his interest aroused, was listening intently. This was something new.)
“Now!” resumed the rabbi. “Around Him stood the angels, God’s blessed angels. How beautiful they were you yourself may imagine. And they cried: Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh — Holy! Holy! Holy! And the temple rang and quivered with the sound of their voices. So!” He paused, peering into Mendel’s face. “Understand?”
“Yeh,” said Mendel understandingly.
— And angels there were and he saw ’em. Wonder if—
“But when Isaiah saw the Almighty in His majesty and His terrible light — Woe me! he cried, What shall I do! I am lost!” The rabbi seized his skull-cap and crumpled it. “I, common man, have seen the Almighty, I, unclean one have seen him! Behold, my lips are unclean and I live in a land unclean — for the Jews at that time were sinful—”
— Clean? Light? Wonder if—? Wish I could ask him why the Jews were dirty. What did they do? Better not! Get mad. Where? (Furtively, while the rabbi still spoke David leaned over and stole a glance at the number of the page.) On sixty-eight. After, maybe, can ask. On page sixty-eight. That blue book — Gee! it’s God.