Finding Something to Love in Everyone.
Well, that was a start. When you came right down to it, there was something lovable in every human being. Jessie Tunman? She was a hard worker. The world would fall apart without Jessie Tunmans. The coal man? Out day after day in every kind of weather, keeping everyone’s home warm. Sergeant Moncozzi— He drew a blank on Sergeant Moncozzi, disrupted his chain of thought, sat with his mind skittering in a hundred directions for a minute and then t crossed out what he had written and typed in a new title:
If You Can’t Love, Then Tolerate.
“Excuse me,” said the lady next to him, “are you a writer?”
He looked up at her. She had got on in Matawan, a tall, skinny woman with an old-fashioned wedding ring belligerently displayed on her finger, hair an unlikely yellow, face made up so heavily it had to be concealing wrinkles. “Not exactly,” he said.
“I didn’t think so,” she said. “If you were a real writer you’d be writing instead of just staring at the paper like that.”
He nodded and went back to looking out the window. The tandem bus was creaking up the long slope of the Edison Bridge, the motor groaning and faltering to make forty kilometers an hour. It was all right on the straightaway, but on anything more than a three percent grade it could not even reach the legal limit of eighty. Down below the river was choked with breaking-up ice laced together with a tangle of northern water hyacinth. A tug was doggedly trying to clear a path for a string of coal barges running upstream.
“When I was a girl,” the woman said, leaning across him to peer out the window, “this was all oil tanks.” She rubbed a clear spot on the window and scowled at the housing developments. “Dozens of tanks. Big ones. And all full. And refineries, with the flames coming out of the top of them where they were burning the waste gas. Waste gas, young man! They didn’t even try to save it. Oh, I tell you, we had some good times in 1970.”
If You Can’t Love, Then Tolerate.
Exercising his tolerance to the full, Horny said, “I guess there have to be places for the people to live.”
“People? Who’s talking about people? I mean, where’s the oil now, young man? The Communists have it all, what the Jews left us. Wasn’t for them, we’d have good times again.”
“Well, madam—”
“You know I’m right, don’t you? And all this crime and pollution!” She sank back into her seat, neck craned to stare at him triumphantly.
“Crime? I’m not sure I see how crime comes into it.”
“Plain as the nose on your face! All these young people with nothing to do! If they had their cars they could ride around with a six-pack and a couple of girls, and who could be happier? Oh, I remember those times, until the Jews spoiled it for all of us.”
Horny Hake fought back his temper. She was, of course, referring to the Israeli reprisals against the Arab League, the commando and air attacks that had blasted open every major oilfield in the Near East, causing the Abu Dabu firestorm and a thousand lesser, but immense, blazes. “I don’t agree, madam! Israel was fighting for its life.”
“And ruining mine! Talk about pollution. Do you know they increased the particulate matter in the air by seven point two percent? And it was just to be mean.”
“It was to save their lives, madam! It wasn’t the Arab armies that put Israel in danger. They proved that six times. It was the Arab oil, and the Arab money!”
She looked at him with dawning comprehension, then sniffed. “You Jewish?” she asked. “I thought so!”
Hake swallowed the answer and turned back to the window, steaming. After a moment he put the lid back on the typewriter, slid it under the seat, closed his eyes, folded his hands and began practicing his isometric exercises to relax.
The trouble with the question was that it had a complicated answer, and he didn’t like her well enough to give it. Hake didn’t think of himself as Jewish—well, he wasn’t; but it was more complex than that. He didn’t think of himself as a minister, either, or at least not the kind of person he had always thought of as a minister, back when he was a kid. Considering how his life had changed in the past two years, he wasn’t altogether sure who he was. Except that he was himself. Physically he might be somebody new, but inside he was old Horny Hake, whose choices were limited, not too lucky with women, not too financially successful. Maybe not even too smart, at least compared to the bright new kids out of the seminaries. But the center of his own personal universe, all the same.
The first memory Horny Hake had of his early life was being carried, hastily and not very carefully, through the wheat fields of his parents’ kibbutz. The sprinklers were going, and the sour smell of the grain was heavy in the sodden, sultry air. He was maybe three years old at the time, and it was way past his bedtime.
He woke up with a yell. Something had scared him. It was going right on scaring him: crunching, roaring blasts of sound, people shouting and screaming. He didn’t know what it was. Little Horny knew what rocket fire sounded like well enough, because he had heard the kibbutz militia practicing in the fallow fields every week. This was different. He could not identify these terrifying eruptions with the orderly slow fire of the drill. Neither had he heard people shriek in agony and fear when rockets exploded. He began to cry. “Sssh, bilmouachira,” said whoever was carrying him, gruff, scared, a man’s voice. Not his father’s. When he realized that neither his mother nor his father was with them, that he and the unknown man were all alone, he stopped crying. It was too frightening for tears.
At three he was still young enough to be treated as a baby, too old to like it. He also disliked the physical sensations of where they were; it was unpleasantly hot, but the mist from the sprayers was clammy cold. “Put down, magboret” he yelled, but the man who was carrying him didn’t put him down, he clamped a dirty, calloused hand that tasted of grease and salt over Horny’s mouth. Then Horny recognized the hand. It was old Ahmet, the Palestinian electrician who ran the milking machines at the kibbutz, and babysat for Horny when his parents flew into Haifa or Tel Aviv for a weekend.
By all rights Horny’s life should have ended right there, because the PLO commandos had them dead to rights. What saved them was a diversion. Horny remembered it all his life, a tower of flame that seemed to reach the sky. He got it confused in his mind, as he grew up, with the Abu Dabu firestorm, when the Israelis dumped their shaped nuclear charge into the oilfields that gave the Arabs their muscle. It was impossible, of course. Probably what had actually exploded on the edge of the kibbutz was no more than the tractor gas pumps. But it kept the commandos busy enough for long enough to save his life.
Horny never saw his father again. None of the male militia at Kibbutz Meir survived the first strike. Horny’s mother lived, but she was too seriously wounded to go back to farm life. She took the baby and returned to America, lived long enough to marry a widower with five children and bear him Horny’s half-sister. It was the best she could do for her son, and it wasn’t bad. He grew up in that family in Fair Haven, New Jersey, well cared for and well educated.