Assuming the lectern after Dr. Morse’s introduction and waiting for him to resettle his bulk at front-row-center, Netanyahu expressed a hint of regret; reminding all of us—Corbin professors and Seminarians and Corbindale Rotarians and Shriners and their wives and students who might’ve been mine and some dazed Korean exchange students who weren’t, shifting in our squeaking seats in the overheated theater—that this was a lecture open to the public and so its contents would have to remain fairly generalist, even popular.
“Tonight I’m going to speak about my subject in a way that all in my audience can hopefully relate to,” he said, in a statement that should’ve been promising, but from his mouth was more like an apology twinged with contempt.
He explained that his field, or one of his fields, was the Jews of Medieval Iberia, which, he admitted, might not strike a hall of gentiles in present-day America as pertinent. That said, his objective this evening was to dispel that notion, and to do so in an entertaining fashion. And then he smiled, and the effort was evident. Ingratiation was a strain on him.
For the purposes of this lecture, he said, he was going to bookend Jewish Iberia between two depredations—one by the crescent, and one by the cross. The first occurred in the 1140s, when a fundamentalist Muslim Berber dynasty called the Almohades defeated another dynasty called the Almoravides for control of al-Andalus, or Moorish-ruled Iberia, and attempted to forcibly convert its Jews, who refused and fled to other domains in Europe as well to the Maghreb. The second occurred centuries later, when the Jews who’d returned to Iberia over the course of the Reconquista were expelled by the Catholic monarchies—expelled from Spain in 1492, coinciding almost exactly with the date Columbus left on his first expedition, and expelled from Portugal in 1496, the year Columbus returned from his second.
That, at least, was the traditional history, which Netanyahu acknowledged might not be entirely accurate by the standards of those who suffered it. Because unlike the Jews of nearly every other expulsion of the Medieval period—unlike the Jews expelled five times from France (by Philip II in 1182, Louis IX in 1250, Philip IV in 1306, Charles IV in 1322, and Charles VI in 1394); unlike the Jews expelled from Bavaria in 1276, from Naples in 1288, from England in 1290, from Hungary in 1360, and from Austria in 1421—the Jews expelled from Iberia toward the end of the fifteenth century might not have been Jews at all, or might not have regarded themselves as Jews, or as anything but Christians.
This was because they’d converted—or their ancestors had. The descendants of Jewish families that had resisted forcible conversion to Islam in the twelfth century, and that had returned to Iberia with the Reconquista a century later, started converting to Christianity of their own free will, with tens of thousands if not a hundred thousand and more Jews Christianizing over the next two centuries. This was the first and only mass Jewish conversion movement in world history and, most importantly, it was not compelled, but voluntary. The reasons for it were manifold, ranging from a desire to take advantage of the new social and material advancement on offer to converts under Christian rule, to an apocalyptic attitude inculcated in Jewry by the constant centuries of Muslim-Christian warring, which manifested itself at the precise point at which the tide appeared to turn in Christendom’s favor (after the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, 1212, which left the Muslims with no Andalusian holdings save Granada). Mass societal conversions such as these depend as much on the strength of the newly assumed identity as on the weakness of the identity it’s replacing, he said, and Judaism throughout Crusader-era Europe was already considerably weakened by anti-Semitic legislation, oppressive taxation, and the mayhem of pogroms. For these reasons, and for myriad more, he argued, Jews in Iberia flocked toward the Church, converting—especially at the turn of the fifteenth century—at astonishing rates that bespoke a messianic fervor, with some considering their conversions vital not just to the re-Christianization of Iberia, but to the salvation of the Jews, or of the world. This much is clear, regardless of stated motivation, or justification: these converts were sincere and their conversions were intended as multi-generational, permanent and lasting. These Jews lived as Christians and tithed to the Church and produced Christian children who were baptized in the Church and knew no other identity. They made confession and took communion and believed that Christ, the son of God, was their redeemer.
This, Netanyahu said, was historical fact. It was inarguable. But it begged a Jewish Question that for ages went unanswered, even unasked: If so many Jews became Christians willingly, what need was there for an Inquisition? Or, to put it another way, what was the point of convening a body dedicated to promoting the Christian faith, if the Christian faith was doing just fine promoting itself without it?
This was the problem that Netanyahu set out to solve, and it involved, he said, cutting through all manner of deliberate obscurity and drivel, not least from the Inquisition itself: texts that claimed that the conversos (as they were called) were only Christians of expedience and still practiced Judaism in secret; texts that claimed that the conversos’ conversions were invalid, because they’d been bribed to convert, or forced to at swordpoint . . . none of which made much sense. Why was the Inquisition attacking the very people it was supposed to be supporting? The very people it was supposed to be creating? Why go through the expense? Why go through the trouble? The Inquisition was bent on punishing the very converts the Church was always evangelizing for, and it was this paradox—an almost Jewish paradox, Netanyahu said—that caused him to reconsider the institution’s nature.
His conclusion, he said, which he could only partly summarize now, lay in the origins of the institution itself. Put bluntly, the Iberian Inquisitions—the Spanish and later the Portuguese Inquisitions—which had been charged with rooting out heresy, were heretical themselves. They claimed, by their name and by their charters, the mantle of the Medieval Inquisitions of the Catholic Church, but while those bodies answered to the Pope, the Iberian Inquisitions answered to monarchs. This was a crucial distinction: it meant that the Iberian Inquisitions were not religious but political institutions, founded to mitigate the tensions between the monarchy and the nobility—between the heads of kingdoms and the rulers of provinces and cities. When Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon sought to join their kingdoms and unify Spain in the image of their own union of 1469, their chief opposition was nobiliary, the princes, grandees, and hidalgos who resisted having to cede their local authority. What resulted was a struggle in which the monarchy attempted to systematically impoverish and disempower the nobility, but because a direct attack on the nobility was inadvisable and tantamount to civil war, the monarchy decided that the best approach would be a sort of proxy: They’d get at the nobles by oppressing the Jews, who managed the nobles’ estates and farmed their taxes. Having decided upon this method, they realized that full subdual of the nobility could only be accomplished by oppressing the Jewish converts to Christianity too, because while so many had changed their religion, they’d retained their familial professions and ties in the realm of international finance. At the same time, the monarchy sought to arouse the intrinsic anti-Semitism of the commoners and parlay it into anti-converso sentiments as well, instigating libels and riots that disrupted civic order and depleted the resources of any nobility that sought to quell them.
Depriving the nobility of the services of the Jews was easy: the Jews could always just be slaughtered. But depriving the nobility of the services of the conversos was a different matter, because the conversos were, officially, Christians, and any attempt to disenfranchise them and invalidate their conversions would have threatened the integrity of the Church. The Spanish Inquisition was founded to provide a way out of this bind, and a justification for converso-oppression. It did so through offering the monarchy a simple redefinition: Judaism had always been defined, and defined itself, primarily as a religion—as a set of tenets, and a set of practices—but the genius of the Spanish Inquisition was to insist it was a race, with the implication that even a convert to Christianity, even a fervent new Christian, was still a Jew at heart, because Judaism inhered in the blood. Once these new Christians were racialized back into a Jewish identity, they could once again be oppressed: they could be exorbitantly taxed; they could have their property and assets seized; and, with the nobility rendered too impotent to protect them, they could be expelled from the country entirely.
That was Netanyahu’s thesis, in reckless synopsis: that Iberian Jewry was perennially caught between a native host populace that rarely changed and an absentee host rulership that changed constantly with conquests. Whenever tensions arose between these bodies politic, they were taken out on the nobility-enabling Jews, whose oppression restored civic balance. The main requirement of this process was merely that the Jews stayed Jewish, which was why when they began to convert—willingly, for the first time in their history—they were punished and admonished that they could never be other than what they originally were.
This restatement marked a pivot in his lecture, to a different mode in which the academic prose fell away and I could make out the wrath of the veteran propagandist, the touring public-relationist touting his own delusions as definitive.
As his voice changed—got louder, looser—Seminarians and Koreans shifted in their seats; Edith reached for my copy of the evening’s program (“Presenting B.Z. Metayahu”) and started tearing it into strips as if in mourning.
Tzila lolled her head and appeared to drowse.
The revolutionary influence of this redefinition must be insisted upon—Netanyahu insisted, launching himself into this new mode with a podium-slap. The Spanish Inquisition, he claimed, introduced the idea that a person could not essentially change or be changed, but was in fact defined and determined by corporeal factors, by how many degrees tainted they were from that prelapsarian or just pre-miscegenated state the Spanish called limpieza de sangre: blood purity. In promulgating this idea, the Spanish Inquisition became the first institution in world history to treat Judaism primarily as a race, as a sanguinary quantum and heritable trait that could not be lost or abrogated; setting the precedent for subsequent genocidal and quasi-genocidal regimes so numerous and notorious, he said, that I don’t have to name them. And then he named them: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Arab Ummah, the lattermost of which had expelled nearly all of its Jewish population in only the last decade, sending refugees coursing from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt into Israel.
Thinking about this turn of rhetoric now, I find it poignant, though at the time it struck me as strident. And I knew, somehow I knew, that this new pitch he was making in this new firebrand style was the one he’d perfected in countless “addresses” and “orations” and “public chats” in heartland synagogues and chapels and schools on Jabotinsky’s tent-revival circuit—that the only way out of gentile history was through Zion.
He banged the dais full-fisted, leaned over it, and with all the gross abstraction of fanaticism spoke of Poland, where he was born and grew up during the first of the century’s two great European wars, at a time of fracturing empires. The decline of Austro-Hungary caused, or was caused by, or both—in his frenzy, he seemed to say both—provincialism, parochialism, and a rise in desire for nation-state autonomies. This was always the case with marginal identities in the context of empire: identity on the racial or ethnic or religious or merely linguistic level is what you revert to after the transnational project fails; only after you can no longer conceive of yourself as a citizen of Austro-Hungary, and as having been dignified and elevated by that citizenship, can you begin conceiving of yourself as, say, a Pole, a Czechoslovak, a Romanian, a Bulgarian, or a Zionist Jew. Now, after the second of the century’s wars, with the new European empire being Asiatic-Soviet, the same thing would eventually occur, sooner than anyone thought: socialism, communism, would fragment back into its tribal constituencies. This was also why an Arab League would never survive, because no people were more clannish than the Arabs, whose basal loyalties weren’t even sectarian but familial. It was the function of empires to furnish a common identity to disparate peoples and whenever they couldn’t, they failed. This would even be true with America, where everyone if they’re asked who they are answers Irish, or Italian, or preposterously three-quarters Scottish, half-Belgian-Dutch, and at most one-drop Mexican black, anything but American. If the American empire couldn’t persuade allegiance to democracy over origin, it would fail. He said that while staring at me, unblinking: It would fail. He might even have been pointing at me: You will. What was true for Europe at the emergence of Zionism will one day be true for America too, once assimilation is revealed as a fraud, or once it’s revealed that the country contains nothing to assimilate to—no core, no connate heart—not just for the Jews, but for everyone. This, at least, was his implication, the text behind the text of his lecture, which he continued to speak to me with his hooded steppe eyes even after his prepared remarks were finished and he was making his acknowledgments and bowing to the light, deferential, and relieved applause: This is what I think of America—nothing. This is what I think of American Jews—nothing. Your democracy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism—nothing. Your chances for survival—none at all. You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you’re over and finished; in only a generation or two the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won’t give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; the boredom of your wife—who’s tearing her program up into little white paper pills she’d like to swallow like Percodan—isn’t merely boredom with you or her work or with the insufficiency of options for educated women in this country; it’s more like a sense of having not lived fully in a consequential time; and the craziness of your daughter isn’t just the craziness of an adolescent abducted from the city to the country and put under too much pressure to achieve and succeed; it’s more like a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning for her and every challenge that’s been thrust at her—from what college to choose to what career to have—is small, compared to the challenges that my boys, for example—whom she’s been condemned to babysit—will one day have to deal with, such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history. Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable, with your frigidaires and color TVs, in front of which you can munch your instant supper, laugh at a joke, and choke, realizing that you have traded your birthright away for a bowl of plastic lentils . . .
•
. . . or at least for another glass of blood-red plonk, which Dr. Morse invited everyone to partake of, once the applause had faded . . .
Thankfully, there was no mention of a Q&A session. The lecture had gone on long enough. People were milling up out of their chairs and making their way out of the theater and into the reception area, digging into slices of jambon and manchego and gummy paella with hard white rice—as close at it came to tapas in 1960s Corbindale, a spread co-sponsored by History, the Seminary, and the Hispaniola Society.
The cheese was a large solitary block that everybody put their hands on. The ham sat on a carving slab next to a big sharp knife with an antler handle. The wine wasn’t Iberian but that same sugar-fortified Niagaran vintage the Netanyahus had been drinking for a while now, pour-yourself out of fiasco-basketed jugs.
I felt false. My suit, my tie, my pipe, my skin all felt a costume.
Netanyahu, glorioled in sweat, stood with Tzila behind a wall of compliments, Seminarians, and Dr. Huggles. Tzila had a wineglass in each hand. Netanyahu caught my eye and winked.
“I said I’m tired,” Edith said. “Are you even listening?”
“I’m listening. I’m tired too.”
“I want to go home.”
“Let’s. I guess our guests will find their way back on their own.”
“I wouldn’t count it a tragedy if they didn’t.”
“I just don’t want you walking alone.”
“I don’t care about walking, Ruben. I care about having to fold-out the couch on my own . . . You could at least help with that . . .”
She looked exhausted. She’d gotten drunk and almost sober again, sitting through a lecture. She’d made small-talk and now was done. She’d done her spousal duty. The rest was just tucking in sheets. “I’ll get our coats,” she said, but on the way to the coatroom was buttonholed by Mrs. Morse, who was curious about paella.
So I went and found Dr. Hillard going through my pockets. “Did you lose something?”
“Just what you took from me.” He reached into an inner pocket and extracted his excellent pen.
“I must’ve just put it there from habit.”
He handed me my coat. “An interesting habit.”
I took Edith’s coat off its hanger and took my hat down from the shelf and, for the promotion of levity, held it out to him. “Want to check inside here too?”
He peered down into the dandruff and said, “Even when you’re wearing it, it’s empty.”
Dr. Morse came in to get his own bundles, and his wife’s. “Dr. Hillard, have you heard—we have even more to thank Rube for than we were aware of?”
He gathered up the Netanyahus’ shearlings—“the Blums are putting up Dr. Netanyahu and his family”—and heaped them atop Dr. Hillard. “That’s a mark of true dedication, Rube, stepping in where the Corbindale Inn so sorely let us down.”
“You have Edith to thank, believe me.”
“I do believe you.”
Dr. Hillard walked out muttering under sheepskin.
“We’re very grateful, and I think the least we can do to demonstrate our gratitude is to provide an escort home . . . a lot of football brutes abroad this evening . . .”
So that’s how we set off: as an audience, exiting together through the connecting corridor into the tenebrous halls of Theater Arts; Edith’s brisker clip already putting distance between us as we headed for the coldening.
Sometimes the halls of the college can feel endless, like you’ll never get out, and sometimes, because so many of the halls look the same, you can feel like you’re lost and often you’ll come out of an accustomed exit and suddenly not recognize the world. It’ll take you a moment to get your bearings. Especially in a blizzard.
I crooked my arm into Edith’s and tried to support her, tried to slow her, as she rushed us ahead through the snow, booting holes into the whiteness.
Quiet reigned over the Quad. A Gothic quiet. The stone buildings were distant hills. I leaned over to my wife’s cold ear and asked, “So what did you think of the lecture?”—the obligatory post-lecture, on-the-way-home-from-the-reception question that usually wrung a laugh or at least a smirk from her, but now: she shrugged my arm off.
Approaching Mather Corbin, sneaking up on our old enthroned founder from behind, I tried again to instill some cheer by pointing at my wife and saying, “Bow down before the idol, woman. Humble thyself before thy God.”
But Edith was having none of it. “Stop it, Ruben.”
“So you choose death for your whoredoms, woman?”
“It’s not funny. I choose you cut it out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I choose you let me be. I’m thinking.”
I did, I let her be. Edith with her moods, with her winter coat and stockings. She adjusted her muff and picked at the dry skin around her nostrils. Under the gas-jetted lanterns, my wife was a winter coat and stockings and a weak chin that doubled when she focused on her feet, her spraddled gait like she was always wearing snowshoes.
Hastening off campus, the silence I’d been holding was dispersed by the winds, bringing the partying squalls and caws of bawdy Crows.
“I know it’s already been decreed,” I said, “that the adults will take downstairs and we’ll fix the kids up in my study . . . but maybe we can put the kids down on the couch and let the adults have our room, so we can take my study together?”
“You’re incorrigible, Ruben.”
“It might be fun. Me and you and Judy’s sleepingbag?”
We stood on a snowblasted corner, Edith looking behind us to the lanterned glow of the campus gates, where colleague-revenants were waving; taking leave of Dr. Hillard, who was heading back to his bachelor’s cell.
“Remember when we were young, Ruben?”
“I do.”
“When we were young, we took everything so seriously. Everything we read. Every exhibition and concert and book. All those poems. We were serious people and believed in things. In ideas. So sincere. And the way we talked: ‘ethical aesthetics’ and ‘the moral passions of the culture’ . . . The way we talked about politics: ‘the freedom from fear,’ ‘the freedom from want,’ and how it was honorable to serve your country, and how even being skeptical of your country could be a way of serving it . . . We were so earnest and principled but so intense, about democracy and love and death, as if we knew what those things were . . .”
“I remember. We were good little Jews.”
“What’s wrong with you? Who said anything about Jews? I’m sick and tired of hearing about Jews. I’m talking about the two of us.”
“Sorry.”
“What I’m trying to say, Ruben, is that meeting this horrible man and his horrible wife, it made me realize something. It made me realize I don’t believe in anything anymore and not just that, but I don’t care. I have no beliefs and I’m OK with it; I’m more than OK, I’m glad . . . I’m glad I’m getting older without convictions . . .”
“What’s Judy always saying, and her friends? ‘It’s copacetic’?”
“It’s copacetic.”
She retook my arm and we walked on, a pair of sweethearts in the snow. Our block was totally socked in. Hedgerows of snow. The pearly humps of cars.
We shuffled up the steps to our door, where the snow was soft and powdery and, even at the topmost step, under the overhang, calf-high.
I think of it as a blessing: may you never lock your door . . . may you never have to lock your door . . . I opened the door and—resisting the impulse to sweep her up like a bride—held it open for Edith. She stepped inside. She crunched onto the mat and bent down to untie her laces but stopped and turned and clung to me. I looked over her shoulder, through the lens fog, and saw our new television cabinet tipped over face-first, its screen shattered, and the youngest Netanyahu boy curled fetal atop a mound of gingerbread house scraps and glass.
He must’ve tugged the TV down atop himself like Samson with the columns. He must be dead, I thought, because Samsons don’t get injured. But then he chewed some candied roof and shifted his position and the glass beneath him tinkled.
“He’s asleep,” Edith said.
I think she’d also forgotten his name.
She went to put on the lights and I, sensing some stirring upstairs, ascended, and halfway up noticed the middle boy, Benjamin, just past the stairhead, crouched like an Indian scout atop the carpet runner in the hall; his fat face lit in the lucent sliver coming through the slightly-ajar new door to Judy’s room. As the downstairs lights flicked on, he turned and saw me and froze. He was a fat trapped baby deer frozen in the house-lights, looking down at me and then looking up at the cracked-open door and then looking down at me again and hollering—I think he hollered, “Yoni!” but like it had the meaning of “Geronimo!” and charged me; he knocked me into the landing wall and, pinballing against the banister, stumble-fell past me and off the landing and all the way downstairs. I recovered just in time to see the eldest boy, Jonathan, dashing stark raving naked out of my daughter’s room, his headstrong rigid penis toggling with his stride between pointing rudely out to spear me and sticking straight up at the ceiling from within its dense coiled nest of jet-black hair. Too stunned to grab him—actually, unsure of exactly how, or where, to grab him—I flattened myself against the wall again, and as he bounded past me on the landing, the smell of heat and sex on him was unmistakable. Judy was at the door to her room, shrieking, hiding her nakedness behind the door. Edith was coming up the stairs now and pushing me aside and yelling at Judy, who in yelling back stepped out from behind her door and showed herself all breasts and bush and now Rockette legs afling, as she prepared to defend herself and her bumpless nose from her mother, who hurled herself atop her. I hurried up to pull Edith off, but got a wet boot-heel in the eye and slid down some stairs and struck my scalp and the name of the youngest boy came back to me, as Kiddo—Iddo was crying downstairs. I looked down but couldn’t find him. I went down and looked around, threw open the closet, checked under the tray-table, checked by the piano and easel and shelves, and, spooked by a draft on my neck and a close-by cry, I spun around and saw him stepping charred from the hearth and sucking his thumb and tearing, his feet cut up and bloodied by screen shards, his toes coruscant with rainbow sprinkles. Behind him, a trail of glass, pulverized sweets, and bloody partial prints led out the open door and from there became troughs in the snow. I followed the trail outside, where it forked into zigzags and crisscrosses of my and Edith’s making; into switchbacked paths like a wounded man had lurched onto the Dulleses’ property, where I intercepted Dr. Morse and the Netanyahus. I looked past them down Evergreen; I looked across the street. I tried to avoid their eyes and had just managed to say, “You haven’t seen your boys, have you?” when Edith came hurtling along the sidewalk like a sacking linebacker and slid directly into Tzila, tackling her into a snowbed, and the two of them rolled around rumpling the cold blanket of the Dulleses’ lawn; Edith screaming—I don’t think I’d ever heard her scream in public before, and I’m sure I’d never heard her curse—“Deviants! perverts! mad sex criminals! your sons belong in the fucking zoo for rapist animals!” I struggled to tug her off, tugging her by her ankles, as Dr. Morse and Netanyahu stood by stunned. “Go find your boys,” I yelled, as I kept circling the thrashing tangle of women, trying to pry mine loose, “they ran away somewhere.” Lights flicked on in the Dulleses’ house and I said to Dr. Morse, “If you wouldn’t mind, could you go up there and ask the Dulleses to call the police and say two boys are running around in this and one of them’s naked?”
“He’s naked?”
“Only one of them.”
Dr. Morse hustled his bulk up to the Dulleses’ door, and Edith was all-foursed atop Tzila with her hair hanging down like a veil, pinning her, panting, and the woman at bottom was laughing and hiccupping and babbling hysterically in Hebrew.
“What the fuck’s so funny?” Edith gasped. “What the fuck’s this loony bitch saying?”
Netanyahu, composed, dignified, said, “That loony bitch who is my wife is saying that you’re a Puritan. And that it’s she who should be angry with you because if anything sexual happened between any of our boys and your daughter, it’s your daughter who’s at fault, because she’s older.”
“Stop laughing. You’re drunk.”
“But she’s not angry with you, not angry at all,” Netanyahu went on translating his wife’s babble, pausing to check a phrase and then scowling and continuing, “in fact she’s happy that at least someone in this family is having sexual relations.”
Tzila howled and Edith grabbed a fistful of snow and stuffed it down into her face and stood up and slipped and staggered up again homeward.
As Netanyahu helped his wife to her feet, I told myself: don’t apologize; only a coward would apologize. “It’s only the older two boys. They ran off. Iddo is still at the house.”
Tzila spat snow. “And you’re sure he’s safe there with your daughter who seduces?”
Dr. Morse stepped out from the Dulleses’, saying the police needed the boys’ full names and ages and better descriptions than naked and known-associate-of naked.
I walked back to my property and into the garage for a shovel to dig out the car—I started digging out their car, because I wanted them mobile; I wanted them gone.
But they insisted I drive them, so I got behind the wheel of Rabbi Dr. Edelman’s archaeological Ford and tooled up and down the hobbled streets.
It was hard to see with the single functioning headlight. The beam was weak and wavering and the snow was hissing down like static from a world signed-off, ash from the end of broadcast days.
“And in this weather you tell me they’re naked?” Tzila yelled, from the backseat, where they sat together being chauffeured by me.
“Just Jonathan.”
She cried, “Yoni!” but Netanyahu said, “What does it matter? If he would’ve said Bibi, you would’ve made the same noise too.”
“And why you don’t give them a chance to dress, I don’t know—before you put them out? Yoni hates to be cold and what is Bibi wearing—his pajamas?” She thumped my seatback. “They’ll die! Because of you, they’ll die!” And then she tried to reach up and hit me with the shovel she’d brought with her into the car, but Netanyahu wrested it away from her and sat it back between them, like their substitute mute child.
I hunched down and squinted through the half-moons of visibility cleared by the car’s one wiper, making out black stretches punctured only by the weakling twinkle of the few houses that still had Christmas tapers. Most of the houses were dark, with at most a lone bulb glowering up in bedroom territory. A tangle of tinsel was blown through the air and into a full black holly shrub where it glittered like my daughter’s bush, and there, above the steering wheel, the Stop sign was a breast, scraped red and horripilated.
I stopped and oncoming headlights shone at me like a film projector, showing me Bibi, rolypoly in his footed pjs, grinding himself into the replacement carpet, as Yoni performed for him beyond the door-crack, grunting and thrusting and spurting ribbons . . .
The car shining into my windshield was blaring something Latin, something mambo, and honking in rhythm. I ducked down and nudged out into the intersection and braked, suddenly—so as to avoid running down the students who were crossing the street, and one of the varsity boys banged the hood with a bottle and another tossed a can at the side and some cheerleaders shook their pom-poms at me like radioactively overgrown snowflakes.
I wondered whether if I tailed them, we’d find the boys pledging at one of the tumbledown Greek houses, standing on their heads, guzzling from kegs.
Tzila hiccupped. Netanyahu held his silence.
A police cruiser pulled up and I lowered the window.
“You the folks out looking for the kids?” the officer yelled. “I was just on my way to this other mess but . . .” and he put up a hand and radioed in, “so I’ve got the foreign folks here in that beater Ford and I’ll bring them down to check out the report from the Mews, but I’ll be goddamned if Psi Upsi isn’t throwing some kind of panty-raid rodeo with the Iota Alpha Phis . . .” and his radio garbled, and he radioed back, “got it, copy,” and then said to me, “they’ll take the naked frat boys, we’ll take the naked kids . . . just stay on my icy ass, if that chicken coop can make it,” and he cocked his head for me to follow and I fell in behind him and cranked and cranked but my window wouldn’t be raised.
Snow flowed through and cooled my lap as we rounded the athletic fields and the cruiser’s siren cast a seedy red over the whiteness. The goalposts looked like broken billboards. They looked like they’d once held screens. The tarp over the field was only visible by the flares marking its corners. The bleachers led up to the sky.
We came around toward the carceral Mews, the new prefabricated apartment-blocks where the school’s support staff lived in a serried drab fortification overlooking the bus depot and derelict railroad tracks that protected the campus from the trailerparks and shanties of the poorest townies. The officer leading pulled in between blocks and continued through a miniature version of the inmost Bronx, transported here and only barely suburbanized: a narrow lane at the limits of the plowing, strewn with snowshrouded trash. We got out and walked, the officer leading, the Netanyahus and I trudging, as two more police cruisers came in behind us and from the windows above, black faces looked down in fright; the sirens—the soundless sirens, and more eerie for being soundless—sweeping by and blushing their fright, sweeping a blush across the blank flanks of their buildings. The two rear police cruisers were parked at angles, inclined toward each other and shining crossing cones of light down the lane at a battered dumpster dug into a gigantic glacier stuck with a forest of dismantled Christmas trees, and huddled up against the metal wall was a shivering fat boy in pjs and his shivering sticklimbed older brother cupping prayerful hands over the cold stump of his penis.
The last I saw of the Netanyahus, Tzila was wrapping her shearling around Jonathan’s waist for an oversize loincloth and balking at her husband’s attempts to wrap her in his, and the two of them bickering about it and arguing with the cops and Benjamin wandering over to admire the firetruck, which had just arrived.
I walked back through the Bronxian lane, got my shovel out of the Ford and, wielding it handle-down, used it as a staff to get me through the traffic-jam: an ambulance and a campus security van and a car from the office of the county sheriff.
The front passenger window was open and a dozing, thumbsucking Iddo was being passed through it, into the arms of an ambulance worker who held the kid far out in front and bore him forward to his parents like a soiled package.
I looked through the window and saw Dr. Morse, who gestured me in to ride in the back, like a beast in a moving cage, warm and rank. “What a night!” I said.
Dr. Morse grunted.
The Sheriff—whose face I never got a full sense of, besides a blonde moustache so long it was visible in wisps from behind—drove smoothly and commanded silence.
I tried to keep my shovel from bumping around.
The Sheriff slowed at College Drive and Dr. Morse got out. “Thank you for everything, Sheriff,” and then to me, “Until tomorrow, Rube. It’s been eventful.”
Then he was gone and the Sheriff drove on.
“I can walk from Hamilton.”
“I’m driving you home.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“I know it’s not necessary. But I wasn’t asking you, I was telling you. I’m driving you home. I want everyone off the streets in this weather, even it means I have to be a taxi service for the evening.”
“That’s kind of you, officer.”
“Sheriff.”
“Sheriff . . . it’s a turn up here . . .”
“I know where you live, Professor Blum.”
I sat back, clutching my shovel atop the middle seat’s hump, and looked through the backseat’s bars: the snowpeople buried in their own element out in the yards, the lightless houses where my neighbors slumbered.
The Sheriff took the turn onto Evergreen and stopped in front of my house.
“Thank you.”
“Thank yourself. Thank all the taxpayers.”
I tried, but I couldn’t get out. I just wanted to exchange this stuffy gaol for the one across the lawn, my home sure to be full of shrieking, my bruisenosed bareskinned daughter. But the cruiser’s backdoors didn’t even have handles.
“What a goddamned night,” the Sheriff said. “Those fucking people. Excuse me, Professor Blum. But those fucking people.”
Then he sighed and got himself out of the car and freed me and I clambered out to the sidewalk with my shepherd’s crook shovel.
“Thank you, Sheriff, and I agree with you about those people. The parents of those boys. They’re Turkish, you know,” and I headed up the path.
But my front-door was locked and I didn’t have the key, so I knocked, and as I waited for Edith to let me in, I kept waving the shovel back at the Sheriff and mumbling, “Turks . . . what did you expect? . . . just a bunch of crazy Turks . . .”