And on some days he let himself get lost, for the pleasure of finding his way home again. His mother didn’t worry, because he told her that he’d been setting out candles in the church, polishing the confessional booth, sweeping between the pews. She patted his head and told him that he was a good boy but that he should remind the priest he needed to be home before the sun went down.
One day after eating his pickle and playing a brief game of tag with some children in the streets, the boy decided he was not yet ready to go home. He ought to have gone and asked his mother’s permission to stay out a bit later, told her that he was going on a ride and pointed in the direction he was intending to pedal. But he was ten years old. He felt strength ripple through his legs as he drove his bicycle faster and faster. He felt his first little glimmer of power, and he didn’t want anyone to know where he was going.
At the woods he tucked the bike underneath a flowering bush and ran with abandon through the patches of sun and shade cast by the treetop canopy. The river was running fast and deep, but the boy found a narrow bend and leapt across it, his shoe just barely finding purchase against the far bank. Rooting around in the dirt and leaves, he gathered a supply of smooth, flat stones and tried to skip them over the surface of the water, but the current was too fast and they all sank, cast forward a few feet by the force of the waves.
After a while, the boy got tired. He wanted to go home, but the river looked terribly wide. Had he really jumped across it just a little while ago, he wondered? The sun was beginning to sink towards the hill, but it wasn’t yet late enough to give the boy pause. He decided to rest against the trunk of a tree and make the leap once his strength was regained.
But, of course, he fell asleep.
Meanwhile, his mother was starting to get worried; her son had never stayed out so late after the church service was over, though the time he spent helping the priest had been stretching out longer and longer. She decided to go fetch him home and ask the priest please to not keep the boy for quite so much time.
When the boy’s mother arrived at the church, the sun had just dipped below the horizon, and the woman was alarmed to learn that her child was not there. He left a few minutes after you did, the father told her. I gave him a coin and he rode off on that bicycle of his.
Which way did he go? the mother asked, wringing her hands.
With a frown, the priest shrugged — the boy told him he’d go straight home. After that, he hadn’t thought to watch.
A few hours later the boy awoke. He called out to his mother for a glass of water, as his throat was sore and dry, and he seemed to have kicked the blankets off his bed. Then he started. He was not, he realized, in his bed at all, but on a soft mound of dirt, leaned up against a tree. He’d fallen asleep, and now his mother would be angry.
The moon seemed to howl down at him, a terrible white and open mouth. Something with soft feet shuffled through the shadows deeper in the forest’s bowels. The boy sprang to his feet and jumped over the river, landing on his knees and tumbling through the dirt. He ignored the scratches and scrapes on his hands, the mud on his pants. With his heart pounding up through his tongue, the boy ran to his bicycle without looking back and raced through the dark streets towards his home.
His mother was pacing in front of the door, and his father was sitting at the kitchen table, sighing. He had just arrived home from work, hungry, his hands and knees sore. When the boy rode up on his bicycle, his mother gave a cry, and both parents ran out to the terrified boy.
What happened? his father asked, picking him up as if he were an infant and carrying him inside the warm, bright house. The boy’s mother ran her fingers over his dirty clothes, then hurried to get a warm washcloth to clean away the blood and grime.
Where did you go? she asked.
The boy’s head was buzzing. He was exhausted, frightened, and also concerned. If he told the truth, he knew, he would be spanked and sent to bed with no dinner. There was a chance that his father would take away his bicycle and tell him to walk to church with his mother from now on. His parents would be angry if they knew how long he’d been lying to them.
He opened his mouth. Out came a whimper.
They took me, he said. And then it began.
The boy wove a fabulous story, picking up his cues from whatever came into his head. He remembered buying a pickle from the Jewish grocery, remembered seeing boxes of crackers on the shelves, and remembered the stern, dark eyes of the shop owner. The ringlets of hair.
The Jews took me, he said. When his father looked unconvinced, he said, They wanted my blood for matzoh, and his mother — holding tight to his bleeding fingers — began to cry uncontrollably.
I had to fight them off me. The boy looked up at the ceiling to avoid his parents’ eyes. And then I escaped and I ran through the woods and I just barely got home alive. He began to cry and threw his arms around his mother’s neck. I’m so happy to see you. So, so, so happy to see you, Mama.
Although his father remained somewhat dubious, the boy’s mother spoke to him in a voice so low it was almost a growl. She told her husband to go find his friends and to bring the Jews some kind of justice. She hissed this at his back, as he walked reluctantly out the door.
“Wait.” I grabbed my mother’s hand. “No one did anything to him, though.”
“I know,” said Sara. “But that’s how it was. Sometimes little children do big, bad things.”
The boy’s father got into the spirit of things once he saw the outrage in his friends’ faces. They drank brandy to put a little fire in their bellies, and then they picked up large sticks, fireplace pokers, bats. They smashed the windows in every Jewish house and store and burned the synagogue to the ground. The little boy got to stay in bed the next day and eat sweet plums. He licked sugar syrup from his palm and nibbled the soft plum flesh out from where it stuck underneath his nails.
“So is that how the town died?” I was horrified.
“No,” said Sara. “But people remembered it. Even once the boy had grown up and moved to a different town, they told the story to their children. They told each other around fires at night. So even if they did business with the Jewish side of town, or were friendly, people always remembered.”
“But that’s stupid,” I said.
Sara shrugged. She leaned close to me.
“The things people say have the power to change your life, whether they’re true or not.”
I kept my face upturned towards her, and we stared at each other, both of us seemingly waiting for a kiss. Instead, my mother said, “Ada lied too, you know.”
“About what?” I shrank back just a bit, because her breath was fusty, and I didn’t like the glint in her eyes. My mother didn’t blink as I recoiled. She just stood up and walked over to her closet, pulling out an indigo dress that was cinched at the waist and fell off of one shoulder. She removed her robe and started to dress for the evening, tugging and tucking her body here and there.