I was crying pretty hard. I kept imagining my father telling me to wash my clean face. I needed to say something to Eliyahu, and I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing I thought of:
You knew I was in the nurse’s office.
But when I said it, I was wiping my nose off, and the words went into my sleeve. When I said it, Eliyahu didn’t respond, and I thought he hadn’t heard me, that I had a second chance, and I said what I should have said:
I said, I wasn’t joking on you.
And he said, “Someone is.”
And that was when GlassMan whispered, “Kill.” He’d spotted their guy.
14 DEATH TO THE JEW
Thursday, November 16, 2006
5th–6th Period
And GlassMan jumped up, shouting, “There!” The guy was way up at the front of the crowd, looking around for who he should sit with. The guy was Shlomo Cohen.
There was something very wrong with that. Something didn’t make sense, or at least didn’t seem to, but struggling as I was to keep my gooze in my face, while trying, with my hands, squeezing his shoulders, to help Eliyahu keep his gooze in his, it took me longer than normal to figure out what. Shlomo, I thought. Cohen, I thought.
Shlomo Cohen, Shlomo Cohen.
Why should Shlomo Cohen care about Berman and his scarf, let alone care enough to harm Bernard “Shpritzy” Shpritz? Shlomo Cohen was an Indian, a B-team Indian; what concern of it was his? What was the angle? Neither side of the Shover schism had beef with the Indians; and not just no beef; it went well beyond beeflessness = they were, the Shovers, schisming over who had the right to be the Indians’ semi-official humps and lackeys = both sides of the schism were on the Indians’ side = there wasn’t any reason for an Indian to choose sides. If anything, you’d’ve thought that Shlomo Cohen, the one Israelite Indian, would’ve sided with Berman and the Israelite Shovers, unless — but no… but then again I remembered when he brought me to Bam and Maholtz, on Tuesday’s intramural bus, recalled my disappointment in him for taking me back there without his even knowing why he was taking me back there, how it wasn’t very Israelite a thing for him to do, but that didn’t mean… at least not necessarily it didn’t…Was he — was it even possible? — could Shlomo Cohen be a self-hating Jew? Was there really such a thing outside of fiction? Maybe, I thought. Maybe, maybe. My mom believed there was, and had, on occasion, convinced me there were self-hating Jews in universities — Noam Chomsky, say, or that Finkelstein guy — except that was universities…
But even if there was such a thing as a self-hating Jew who was not a professor, and even if Shlomo was one of those — even if, say, he didn’t want to be thought of as an Israelite by others (which, fat chance, Shlomo Cohen); even if he felt some need to distinguish himself from the Israelite Shovers, or maybe just the Israelites (the Israelite Shovers as proxies for the Israelites?); even if Shlomo, when the scarves got starred, believed it necessary to demonstrate that he wasn’t on the side of those who had starred them, that he wasn’t one of them, or anything like them — why should he attack Shpritzy? Why not go after Berman? Because Berman was big? Sure, Berman was big — and there he was in the field, on the fringe of the crowd, among ten or so other Israelite Shovers — Berman was big. He was really big, actually, June’s ex was, huge, June’s huge ex-boyfriend who didn’t kiss her so there was no reason to picture it, to picture her tilting her head with her eyes closed, under the moon, in front of a door on a concrete stoop, not a stoop but a porch, stoops were for cities, a front-door porch in Deerbrook Park, no reason to think of her up on her tiptoes to meet him halfway as he leaned down and—